Exactly. I thought we were trying to eradicate fossil fuel usage, so saving the coal industry is not exactly a great way to go about that?

In a nutshell, if we keep digging huge amounts of stuff out of the ground and burning it, we are screwed. What about that is difficult to understand?

I am not sure if you are deliberately trolling but this is akin to stating that people still die in car accidents so it is obvious that seatbelts do not work.

The current Covid vaccines we have are some of the most effective ever produced in terms of reducing the risk of infection, severe disease and death, should you be exposed to this particular pathogen. They do not make you invulnerable; nothing does. If you have lots of comorbidities and/or risk factors you are helped by vaccines but the individual risk level still remains substantial.

As a UK resident I agree with the OP. The UK does a significant proportion of the entire Worlds genomic sequencing and somewhere between 1/2 and 1m tests a *day* for a population of ~67m, with the obvious corollaries that we will a) likely see variants first as we are actually looking for them, even though they are widespread globally by then and b) get a high number of cases. If you do not look, you will not find.

I, too, would not be the first to leap to the defence of our Govt. but the statistics do not seem that alarming when you look at the context. All there to see at https://coronavirus.data.gov.u...

I think that is right too.

Do I want my primary interface with the Internet and the place where I shop/bank etc. to be pushed to me on a move-fast-and-break-things basis? No, not really.

Yes, Apple may not have the cadence that Google has in introducing the next great idea, but they do tend to support them for much longer once they have been incorporated. On the security side, Apple have a reasonable record of patching things when serious issues are found and not waiting for the next general release, so I am not sure what the complaints are about, really?

MCAS is most definitely a critical control system; as presented originally it could move the horizontal stabiliser (the most powerful flying control on the aircraft) faster than the pilots, who were themselves unaware of its existence.

For such a system to rely on one sensor with no range/plausibility checking is totally negligent. It is appalling (non-) engineering practice and runs counter to the most basic principles. You would not expect this in a school project, let alone a critical safety application. How any professional could let such an abortion take to the skies is beyond me to understand...

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was working in a hospital that had just installed one of the first MRI units. As it was super high tech, quite a lot of staff volunteered to be test subjects while the machine was being calibrated before being put into service, so they could say they had had an MRI scan.

One of the junior doctors saw a small lump in his arm, so, fearing the worst, arranged for some investigative surgery. By the time that happened, nothing could be found and this lump had disappeared, so he was left with a scar. I think that shows that we did not really know at the time what normal was when it comes to a Gods Eye view of our bodies, and probably still are missing a great deal of knowledge in that area...

Also, it depends on what you define as a scam. A lot of software could be described like that *cough* Adobe *cough* but probably most people are more interested in malware that actively tries to steal from you, rather than something you paid money for of your own volition but does not quite do what you thought it should. Caveat emptor and all that...

Exactly. Also, making a third party toaster-refrigerator-car-blender is not going improve security is it? It is difficult enough tying everything down with the underlying OS, let alone attempting it with what is obviously going to be a mix of bloatware and spyware.

Kill it with fire.

I am in two minds over this: of course mass surveillance of (mostly innocent) people is worrying and conceptually goes against the ideal of a free society. However, stopping it completely is going to make the TLAs task of protecting us from the ever-present danger of bad actors, whether they are rational/irrational harder, maybe to a significant degree. Those who complain about surveillance are probably going to be first in the blame queue if/when something bad happens and those in charge were unaware of the risk.

I do not agree with many Western Govts stance on encryption as backdoors for the few is in reality backdoors for the many. Using intelligence and metadata is fair game, IMO.

Realistically, some parts of some agencies pretty much have to be able to operate outside the law on occasion, for the greater good, but not without oversight. You cannot get warrants for everything and, as above, if something is missed or overlooked, everyone complains about it. Unknown unknowns, etc.

One of the main issues is that once you give permission for these kind of things on a strict need basis, there inevitably follows on a sort of mission creep where it does not stop until you know the whereabouts and thought patterns of every human that exists. How to combine the need for extra-judicial operations with strict oversight is a question that keeps many well-meaning officials up at night, I hope...

I know this will appeal to a certain market segment, but is it a very large one? Where I live, there is a minimum one year mandatory manufacturer guarantee on electronic goods, and after that it is not too expensive to take out insurance or an extended warranty like AppleCare. There is a good chance if you have to call on that warranty and the repair is going to be difficult, they will give you a replacement that is technically more advanced than what you had before (happened to me with an AIO) because they do not make the old model any more.

One of the reasons I hear is that you can upgrade parts but these days that probably means upgrading other parts because of incompatibilities, and at some point you are better off with a new machine rather than the Laptop of Theseus...

I am not a particle physicist but this must be nearer to the famed Kugelblitz than anything we have done so far. Does anyone know how many orders of magnitude away?

Yes, it is a worry.

What happens if they find equivalent problems with some of the mRNA vaccines, like 1 in a million people get ingrowing toenails or their heads explode?

It is a very dangerous precedent to set. It really goes down to regulators being completely spineless and not willing to shoulder any responsibility. If they kill a thousand by delaying a vaccination program, that is OK, but saving 999 and losing one person to a known side effect is seen to be too risky to sign off.