I haven't had a word/office license, or even been plagued with a windows machine of any kind, since 5 jobs ago. Maybe the stodgy old legacy grandfathers of tech still use office and windows. But all the startups I've worked for since have all used gSuite (or Google Workspace after the re-branding) for everything the house of gates used to provide. Endpoints have been all either Mac or Linux laptops in that time. At my current startup, windows machines aren't even allowed on the office wifi. And the only microsoft licenses we have for the entire company are a handful of Teams accounts for the devs and QA who work on that integration and one office license for our bookkeeper who for some reason just really, Really, REALLY loves Excel.

Variable names and what constitutes good or bad ones have been a point of contention and flame wars since most of us were toddlers, or even not even born yet. Remember those crusty old neckbeard rants we used to find on BBSs, usenet, and gopher about how "real programmers" don't eat quiche, program in Pascal, can diagnose bugs by watching das blinkenlights on the front panel, and write and deploy their code fixes by using the bit toggles on said front panel to directly change the assembly in-memory? Yeah... those had a lot to say about variable names too. And they ranged from "Just use a, b, c, etc. And don't comment your code. If some shit-for-brains idiot can't figure it out, they don't deserve to be on the system in terms of first place." to "Your variable names should be so descriptive... use full sentences if necessary... that your code should be readable like a book to a layman and no comments are needed." to every point in-between.

Apple and Microsoft already got Unix on the desktop the only way it'll ever get there. First, write a desktop OS, then hide the Unixish OS in a VM deep in the bowels of it where the 95% of users who aren't interested won't have to look at it.

Yup. And TBH the shares haven't declined that much. $600b sounds like a lot of money, but Apple is trading at $200 ATM and peaked out at something like $230 or $240 when the market was hot before people realized Trump wasn't just talking shit about ruining the economy, but was actually going to do it. The fact that Meta is spending stupid money on AI at the moment ought to be frightening Meta shareholders, not Apple shareholders.

#clickbait

The COVID mRNA vaccines were the culmination of decades of research into genetic vaccines that could be in essence engineered to target a selected antigen without the years of trial and error that are required by the methods we have been using since the 1950s. Within days of the virus genome being published, they had a vaccine design, the months it took to get to the public were taken up with studies of the safety and effectiveness of the heretofore untested technology, ramping up production, and preparing for the distribution of a medicine that required cryogenic storage.

It would be unreasonable not to give the Trump administration credit for not mucking up this process. But the unprecedented speed of development wasnâ(TM)t due to Trump employing some kind of magical Fuhrermojo. It was a stroke good fortune that when the global pandemic epidemiologists have been worried about arrived, mRNA technology was just at the point where you could use it. Had it arrived a decade earlier the consequences would have been far worse, no matter who was president.

The lesson isnâ(TM)t that Trump is some kind of divine figure who willed a vaccine into existence, itâ(TM)s that basic research that is decades from practical application is important.

> Kansas City, it's a big destination for conventions
> because it's in the middle of the country.

Really? I used to have to travel there for work occasionally... not conventions or anything, just a remote site. So I'm not sure about its convention facilities. But KC's airport is just bloody awful and most definitely not suitable for the level of traffic of a major convention destination. The only airport I've personally experienced as worse is Newark... and that's mostly the people that make the place so unpleasant. MCI's people are nice. But the airport itself is just so god-awfully designed I have to think the architect was an active misanthrope who intentionally set it up it to make people miserable. Arrivals aren't so bad... but departures or transfers... ugh... it's like they wanted KC to be a roach motel. You can enter, but you can't leave.

I think a big problem is that there are no controls on the use of that little three arrows in a triangle logo that is supposed to indicate recyclability. So there are many products that are not, in fact, recyclable that do have the logo on them. So how do I know that this plastic bottle is recyclable and this other one is not if they both have the logo? How do I know that only the lid of the pizza box can be recycled, but the bottom of the box has a plasticized sealant that can't be recycled when the logo is on the bottom and there are no instructions otherwise? And as someone else mentioned, just what the hell is the difference between cardboard and paperboard and which inks do and do not make either one impossible to recycle and how is anyone to know when they're on-the-spot at the recycling station and everything has the logo?

So what happens... that could very easily have been predicted if anyone with at least two brain cells to rub together had bothered to do so... is that many people just say "fuck it," look for the logo, and if its there it goes into the recycle bin. Now, you may point to the recycling habits in Japan to counter. But let's be real, Americans are stubborn arses about such things. It will be a multi-generational effort to instill that sort of attentiveness to sorting and recycling here. And no such effort is underway, not even in.California.

What is therefore needed is a new recycling logo... one that is trademarked and only licensed to be used on items that genuinely are recyclable; in fact and not some wishfully thinking fever dream. Granted, there will still be people who use the bins interchangeably. We'll never get the "caring about the environment is communism" people. But if we took this one small step to drastically lower the effort, we'd have the "fuck it" people properly and effectively recycling. And I would bet good money that there are more of the latter than the former.

I watch a lot of maritime disaster videos, so YouTubeâ(TM)s genius algorithm thinks Iâ(TM)d be interested in traveling on a cruise ship.

No surprise at all that they sided with the corporations. Nothing positive for the consumers and people was ever going to get through that gauntlet of wickedness and corruption in the first place.

Why would there be one? This looks like a bog-standard corporate acquisition with some kowtowing to trump. Skeezy for the latter, but I don't see any climate angle to Juniper's networking kit.

Well, your buying power would be crippled.

Yeah? And why would I take my iPhone to some dodgy kiosk in the mall versus walking another hundred feet to the actual Apple store; where I know the techs are adequately trained, have the actual Apple tools and spare parts (Which the kiosk may or may not invest in even if Apple is mandated to let them glom onto their supply chain relationships.), the repair is likely for free with Applecare, the company will stand by its work, and they may just swap out my borken kit (This has happened to me three times; twice with iPhones and once with an Apple Watch.) with a refurbished or even new one to same me the time?

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

That's all well and good. You understand that. So do I. And probably so do the engineers at Microsoft. But that's not the problem. Let's be real, this is no longer the Swiss-cheese-security Microsoft from the NT/XP. As much as it pains me to admit it, their engineers, at least, have a clue. Moving AV out of the kernel was likely in their backlog. But I'm sure you're as aware as well as I am that engineering teams often have more work than time on their plates, and "nice to have" has a tendency to become "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." And Windows AV wasn't broken... in part because those same engineers knew about the risk and used compensating controls to mitigate it; in this case, by locking down ring 0.

And all was well until some pinheaded pencil-pushing bureaucrat with not a whit of a clue about computers, operating systems, kernels, or InfoSec was given some power. And like all sad little people who are out of their depth but are entrusted with some, he or she decided to pull a "Respect mah au-thor-i-tah!" flex and ordered those engineers, about whose work he very obviously has not the smallest clue, to open up ring 0 to every random fly-by-night outfit with inflated ideas about their own competence, like CrowdStrike.

Yes. Making your kernel more micro and moving AV into userspace is the smart move. But the way this came about was unnecessary and profoundly, catastrophically, stupid.