Every day, we hear people who read tabloid news reporting instead of scientific papers complaining about the lack of scientific rigour in the things that they read about climate change.

For transatlantic flights, it would be a horrible idea, but there are other routes (e.g. a lot of European short-haul flights with carriers like Ryanair and things like the 30-minute NY to Boston run) where a perch would probably be more comfortable than the existing non-reclining awful seats. Especially if they made it possible to board faster so you're spending less time in the plane...

That's technically true, but not practically true. Most software gains very little (more entropy in ASLR) from moving to using 64-bit pointers. Most software gains a lot from moving from x86-32 to x86-64 as the ISA. In particular, it gains a lot more registers (and, importantly, loses the restrictions on which instructions it can use). It gains cheap PC-relative addressing (i.e. shared libraries are a lot faster). It gains SSE2 as a baseline, so floating point operations and calling conventions are cheaper.

There's a good argument to be made for using the x32 ABI, but generally speaking x86-64 code with the 64-bit ABI will still be faster than x86-32 code using any ABI.

The value of a publicly traded company is the price of the last sale of a share multiplied by the number of shares. The price of the last share is dependent on what the person buying it thinks that they will be able to sell it for. At and IPO, a lot of people expect the demand to be high and so hope to sell it quickly before it eventually drops in value. Others expect that a newly listed company will grow. Slack is in a market that is growing and is increasingly able to convert subscribers into paying customers, so it's not unreasonable to expect them to grow quite a bit. On the other hand, their main competitor is Microsoft (Teams), and so another likely future involves them losing customers in large numbers to a product that many of their customers are already getting bundled with their Office 365 subscriptions.

You've inadvertently flagged the real problem with XMPP: It doesn't store messages server side, or it does store messages server side, depending on which protocol extensions a given implementation happens to have. For anything that you might want to do with XMPP, there are 2-10 different XEPs with varying levels of support, that describe how to do it.

XMPP badly needed a high-quality reference implementation of a server and a library for implementing clients. Instead it got two crappy reference implementations (that were so bad even the standards editor didn't recommend using them) and a load of partial implementations of the client part of the spec.

Why would one US corporation being acquired by another US corporation make any difference to the laws that apply to it?

That's not true for most carriers. If you ask for a SIM-only deal, they will sell you something a lot cheaper. Someone did the analysis of these phone-and-plane deals in the USA 4-5 years ago and found that the best ones worked out to be the equivalent to a loan with an APR of around 40%, a lot were even higher. You can almost certainly get an unsecured personal loan from your bank with better rates than you can get a phone bundle from your network provider.

It's not surprising that a lot of people are unaware of this difference though - when providers are making so much money from selling overpriced loans to people wanting to buy expensive phones, they have a great incentive to hide their good-value plans.

The fact that the people who wanted to leave had no plan and promised a large number of mutually incompatible things (e.g. access to the common market, freedom from EU regulation) and any time they are given some of the things they demand they complain that they don't have the others. Among the things that were promised in the referendum campaign:

• Membership of the common market.
• Freedom from EU regulation.
• Freedom from the European Court of Justice.
• 'The easiest trade deals in history' with numerous other countries.
• £350m/week more available to the exchequer.

If we lose regulatory alignment with the EU, then we can't have freedom of movement over the Irish border, so we're in violation of the Good Friday Agreement. Good luck conducting trade deals when you've just violated an international treaty. If we remain in the common market, we have to remain aligned with the EU for regulation and answerable to the ECJ.

The only Brexit that doesn't involve completely killing the economy (losing 44% of exports and 53% of imports) involves remaining closely aligned with the common market. This means losing our seats in the EU Parliament, Commission, and Council, but still having to follow their rules. That's practically the exact opposite of 'take back control'.

There is no set of compromises that will keep the 51% (closer to 46% now) happy because they voted for an impossible set of constraints.

Then you're part of the problem.

You prefer your propaganda to be government, establishment, and corporate approved?

Fuck off with that shit. Those other people can choose to get vaccinated. And for the rare few that can't get vaccinated -- well that's their fucking problem. Fuck you and your authoritarian mindset.

You're not going to live in a utopian world. Err on the side of freedom. People need to decide for themselves.

Fuck off, you censorsorious asshole. You'd be the first to cry if it was your speech being censored.

> Central and South American countries have vaccination rates higher than the places in the US currently experiencing outbreaks.

I'll wait for your source. Of course, those that modded you up did not, because it's feel-good virtue signaling. Meanwhile:

Oh, look, here's Guatemala: 67%

There was a case on Slashdot a few years ago where someone had a camera and microphone in their porch, which they used to record the police. They were charged under wiretapping legislation. I don't know what happened to the case in the end, but if they were successfully prosecuted then I can imagine that Bezos and Pichai would be liable for a few million counts of the same.