They're not the most fun to breathe in, but a properly fitted N95 is actually useful against wildfire smoke, too. I wouldn't want to wear one all day in the house, air purifiers are great for that, but they're helpful if you have to go outside.

Beauty of covid is that no one will even give you a sideways look for wearing one now.

This mostly looks like Spy vs. Spy stuff. Pretty much everyone spies on everyone, always, friend on friend as much as friend on frenemy and enemy on enemy. So yes, the US is probably up to their elbows in almost everyone's networks, and Israel is probably up to their elbows in the networks of the US and Russia and China and all their neighbors, and China is up to their elbows in the networks of the Koreas, Russia, the US, etc. In some cases for good reason - I expect the Chinese trust their sometimes-ally NK about as much as we do - not at all. They have a saber-rattling nuclear fool for a neighbor, I expect them to care as much what he's up to as they do about the US.

The biggest difference I see is that China is ALSO up to their elbows in a lot of non-military private company networks in the US and elsewhere, and often seems to give what they find to private industry in their own country to compete economically. The other countries seem to mostly keep spycraft separate from economic development. I'm sure that's not an absolute, but at least at a very high level that's how it appears.

That's interesting, I've had exactly the opposite experience with Comcast support; I live in Western WA, and the few times I've had to call in to their support I've gotten someone in Everett or Lynnwood (about a 90-minute drive from where I live). They've been professional people who knew what they were talking about and were able to help me right away. So, maybe with Comcast it depends on the tier you purchase, or where you live? I'm not sure, but apart from the upload speed being shit (have to pay for 1Gbps download speed to get 25Mbps upload speed) I've had no real complaints with them.

That was my take as well, I have flow quads for years, and maybe watched hundreds of hours of other people flying them, and it seemed like a large quadcopter being flown by someone with a remote. The guy on it seemed almost terrified, and it looked like he took great pains to *not* move during the flight, I am guessing for fear of changing the center of gravity!

So, what are you saying? Infanticide should be legalized? That's the thing I don't understand about all the pro-abortion arguments... there's precious little separating those arguments from arguments for being able to kill a newborn, or a toddler, or...? Where does it stop?

If a woman who was raped is allowed to terminate a pregnancy so that she doesn't have to care for her attacker's offspring and be reminded daily of that traumatic event, then what about the woman who has a child with an abusive husband (possibly even non-consensually) and eventually gains her freedom? Should she be required to care for that child, being reminded daily of the abusive asshole who impregnated her with it? Or should she be allowed to slit its throat so she can move on with her life, free from the reminder of her abused past? Does the woman have "the right over her body" to no longer use her body (her labor, her work effort, her time, etc.) to care for the toddler or school-aged child? Does that "right" allow her to simply end the child?

When we de-value human life at any level, we ultimately de-value human life at all levels.

At least in my area, the free school lunches were not worth eating, and probably caused as many health issues as they solved.

"Cheesy Breadsticks" was a main course once a week, as was pizza so disgusting the kids wouldn't eat it.

There was a time when school meals were actually made to be somewhat nutritious (even legally mandated to be), but apparently that all went out the window with COVID.

If we really want to help lift people out of poverty, particularly children and single parents, the two biggest helpers would be:

1) Free (ok, sponsored by government, but free to the consumer), reliable child care. This is probably most easily accomplished by adding staff at the schools for before/after care. Lack of affordable and reliable child care is one of the biggest things keeping single parents from having stable jobs. This also needs to be coupled with either an option for child care for children who are ill, or legally mandated paid time off for parents with sick children. The middle-of-the-day call "you need to come pick up your child from school because it has the sniffles" is a major impediment to job retention, and needs to be solved.

2) Proper nutritional assistance. Our current food stamp + expired food bank food system doesn't work well, because it's not coupled with education on "how to make a healthy meal on a budget." Many of those living in poverty literally don't know how to prepare vegetables or cook basic foods, which is the real reason so much of what they eat is processed garbage (hot dogs, food out of cans). It is NOT a cost thing - it's far cheaper to buy some vegetables, chicken or pork, dry beans, etc. and make a meal than it is to buy all the processed and canned stuff.

And what's the reason for investigation of crimes that have already occurred? ...
answer: it's to prevent further crime, by two methods: 1) Find perpetrators of previous crime and prevent them from doing it again (via punishment, reform, etc.), an d 2) Show potential criminals that they WILL be caught and punished, as a deterrent.

Thus, the purpose of police is to prevent crime, but the method by which they do so is by reacting to previous crime (because they are seldom in the right place at the right time to proactively stop a crime in progress).

True, and yet... fully autonomous cars are a much harder problem to solve than doppler shift.

Either way, I think a dedicated satellite SOS feature that requires extra hardware on a phone is probably going to be a short-lived feature. If SpaceX can get data to/from a Tmo phone with standard hardware, there's no reason they couldn't do it for other phones (granted, it might make use of the lower frequencies Tmo tends to support, to help penetrate clouds and such, so a handset that doesn't include those bands might not work).

If we're talking basic text messages from phone -> sat now, I imagine it won't be too long (maybe 10-20 years, tops) before we see the same for voice and higher-speed data, and don't have to rely so heavily on local cell towers (though I imagine we'll always need something local to cover certain areas, particularly large concrete buildings, downtown areas, etc.).

Well, since Tmo+SpaceX already announced plans to enable Tmo phones to send messages directly via Starlink (without relying on any custom phone hardware), I suspect this emergency SOS from Apple may have already been one-upped. It's a handy thing to have, but it seems like it'll soon be something a person could do with normal SMS (or possibly a dedicated app) on any Tmo phone. If they wanted to, SpaceX could make an emergency SOS app available for compatible phones from any carrier, free of charge... they're already putting the birds in the air, an occasional SOS isn't going to bog down their network at all, and they would potentially gain a lot of goodwill (both from individual consumers and from regulators).

Depends a lot on the type of round... ball ammo or armor piercing round might just punch a 1/2" hole through it. API, APEI, or HEIAP ammo might be a lot more interesting. Find me a great white and some APEI and HEIAP rounds, and I'll give it a go and send pictures. :)

I have the ball, AP, and API ammo, but the APEI and HEIAP I'm not sure I can legally buy, and I'm fresh out of great whites. Sad, because science wants an answer to this question.

You dare to suggest that people want to do things that are affordable, and would pay to go to the movies if it were?

I'm not all that old; when I was in high school I could go on a reasonable (for high school) date for $20. For a decent dinner and movie together, maybe I'd spend $30-40 at the high end. I could also go to Arco with a $10 bill and an empty fuel tank, and leave with a completely filled fuel tank, a candy bar, and change left over. ...sigh.

A lot might depend on the scuba tank and what it's made of, and also on the rifle used. A .223 is a lot different than a .50 BMG, for example, with very notably different effects on the things they're hitting. My guess is a small round like a .223 would, in fact, just punch a small hole in most scuba tanks. A .50 BMG would likely cause it to fail in a much more catastrophic manner. Carbon fiber tanks also likely react much differently than aluminum or steel tanks. Many variables at play here, and more testing is needed for a definitive answer, I think (and I have neither the time nor the money).

At first blush, the article seems to be saying that Linux systems are becoming more and more like Windows in terms of various types of malware. A careful reading of the well-crafted article will notice that they don't say "infections", it just says "attempts". To be more explicit, it says *attacks*, not "successful" attacks. The way the article is written would lead one to believe that Linux suffering more and more from ransomware and is just like Windows, but the reality is that although the number of attacks may be up, there is no indication that they are being *successful*. The article verges on being an example of fomenting "Fear Uncertainty Doubt", or FUD. I will not attribute nefarious intent when incompetence would adequately explain this article...but I do leave it up to the reader to decide how they judge it.

I don't have a personal hatred for Sprint, but I experienced them as a customer from the late '90s until somewhere around 2010, and then became a Tmo subscriber. I also had the misfortune of experience a few Sprint datacenters around the 2007-2009 timeframe - they were abysmal. I readily acknowledge having little knowledge of the internals of either network (and said as much), but from a consumer standpoint of "do I have reasonably fast coverage where I need it," Sprint went from being a leader to being last in the pack, while Tmo did the opposite.

The underlying network might be utter shite at Tmo, but things like having spectrum that does really well over longer ranges (the 600/700MHz stuff) while Sprint was chasing high-frequency high-datarate stuff that's only really good if you're close to the tower really helped them get their coverage up with adequate speed. I switched carriers because my coverage with Sprint was complete crap everywhere I went. At the time, Tmo had really great service where they had service, but it had a lot of holes/gaps. Now, they have really great service nearly everywhere (and by really great I mean that I can make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and get generally good download speeds when I need them - all of those were untrue of Sprint in my area in the late '00s).