"But only the most egregious circumstances should they be publicly ostracized."

The problem isn't just that he did really creepy stuff, it's that he refused to listen to people saying "you're being a creepy fuck" for years.

Having someone who deliberately does stuff that makes other people not want to be anywhere near him, makes it ridiculous to be in a leadership position. And as people are still having difficulty understanding that (including himself), that's what leads to the 'public ostracizing'.

Those two sections:

5.4 says that AstraZeneca will help the EU find and get other companies producing the vaccine if AZ can't produce enough in the EU or UK.

6.2 says the if the EU buys up too many pre-cursor components of the vaccine, then it won't be held to be AZ's fault.

But the more relevant one is:

5.1 AstraZeneca shall use its Best Reasonable Efforts to manufacture the Initial Europe Doses within the EU for distribution.

Section 5.4 is clear that AZ being allowed to substitute doses from the UK only applies to section 5.4. It doesn't change section 5.1 which is the one that says where AZ are required to manufacture doses.

btw, it seems the production issues at AZ are also affecting deliveries to the UK: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-...

> Their contract says that AZ will use production facilities in the UK to help fulfil their order.

No it doesn't.

They published the contract here: https://ec.europa.eu/commissio... minus a few commercial terms.

Please point out any part that says AZ will use production facilities in the UK.

To be clear, AZ would be allowed to use facilities in the UK, but there is no requirement to do so. Only the production facilities in the EU are guaranteed to be used to fulfill EU orders.

I have no idea what is going on, but the EU are also playing silly buggers with contracts: "European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has threatened to block vaccine exports to the UK and other countries with markedly higher rollouts of coronavirus jabs."

https://news.sky.com/story/cov...

This is almost certainly just the senior EU leaders thinking they need to do something/anything, rather than a cunning plan, as their whole decision making process around vaccines seems to be a bit nuts, which has already resulted in the EU 'accidentally' invoking a blockade of Northern Ireland until people pointed out it was a massive overreaction: https://blog.basereality.com/b...

This chaos has really lowered my confidence in the ability for political leaders to be able to respond competently to crises.

Well to be fair, he cares a lot more about money (even though he has more than he will ever need) than he does about other people's health.

And if you look at it that way, his actions are perfectly reasonable.

> So just use a real camera like the "pros" (of YouTube) do.

Tried that, and my camera overheated.

However any camcorder that has a HDMI output can be used. Although technically not quite as high quality as modern pro cameras are, they can all zoom a decent distance so you can set it up five feet away, and the longer focal length gives a much more pleasing picture that wide view webcams. They can be bought on ebay for $30 or so.

Given that camcorders are designed to work for hours at a time, overheating is not a problem. HDMI to usb dongles can be bought on Amazon for about $10. The one I use only does 1080p at 30fps, but that's fine for me.

> they are _recovering_ from a totalitarian streak,

And implementing their own instead. The EU is concerned enough at this, they are insisting on funding being dependent on the Polish and Hungarian governments respecting the rule of law:

https://www.marketwatch.com/st...

"Hungary and Poland are still vetoing implementation of the European Union’s $900 billion fiscal stimulus package agreed in July, as the European Central Bank is likely to ease monetary policy further later this week.

The two governments are demanding changes to rules making disbursement of the funds to member states conditional on abiding by rule-of-law principles, after raising criticism against their recent laws subjecting the countries’ judiciaries to political control."

> I want them 105% focused on preventing the rise of Skynet and LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE.

The paper she was working on was pointing out that the rise of Skynet would be really really profitable, right up until, and possibly even after, it started killing people. That's why it was so contentious.

And one of the reasons why people are pretty upset about her firing is that not only does it stop the discussion about that now, it also sends a pretty clear message to every other person at google, "if you talk about ethical problems with Google's AI" you will be told to shut up, and then summarily dismissed if you don't.

The description you quoted is a poor description.

A better one is that that union types are supported for parameter type declarations, return type declarations and property type declarations. The RFC is here: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/union...

The short version is that they make APIs easier to use. I wrote one example here, but there are other use-cases: https://en.reddit.com/r/PHP/co...

But they certainly aren't to be used everywhere.

The 'wrong' (or probably more accurately, stupid) associativity is no longer allowed, since PHP 7.4: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/terna...

At some point the 'correct' (or more accurately, what people expect from other languages) might be supported. Currently you need to use () to avoid ambiguous associativity.

> I suspect it is some kind of evolutionary left-over, that no longer has a function.

I have a strong suspicion it is for lubricating the back of the throat and the oesophagus.

I had quite bad childhood asthma, and had massive pain in the region where these glands allegedly are, which was diagnosed as sinus pain, but I think those two things were caused by these glands being inflamed or restricted. Not being able to put out enough mucus would leave my throat irritated and so caused my asthma.

I also sometimes get releases of large amounts of mucus from the back of my throat....like these glands have gone nuts and suddenly decided to produce a whole load of mucus at once.

Now at least I've got a better way of describing what's been happening to my doctor.

"They refused to accept new patients because it was too inconvenient."

Or because they would be unable to get the patients records to be able to see if they had any allergies to medicines.

"The issue is they have no back-up plan. "

The backup plan was diverting patients to an alternative hospital.

For some patients it might be better to start treatment at the nearest hospital. But it's not possible to know the right choice in emergency situations.

> Microsoft's strongest competitive point would be the greater focus on privacy,

This is not currently possible. Microsoft has many divisions that are seeking to make money from using the data of users.

Until those divisions are sold off Microsoft will not be able to give a high enough priority to privacy of users.

"Glass can't be all that expensive if wine can come in glass bottles and still sell for $5."

We have enough industry to use more resources than the planet can support.

The issue isn't the cost, the issue is not pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere.

There is a guy on youtube who while not doing the science, is capable of understanding the science, and explaining it in simple terms:

I'm not going to summarise what he said, but he addressed (as best he understands it) those points yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...