That many authors is not unprecedented, some CERN papers are famous for having thousands of authors, the record is at 5000+.

Why so many? You have to raise that h-index. Researchers are valued by their citation count, and when a big paper comes out and is expected to be cited a lot, everyone wants to be on it.

I have worked on airgapped systems, this is annoying, and generally only done in a classified environment.

Almost all desktop OSes, development environments, etc... expect an internet connection nowadays. For updates, package management, etc... It includes security software. Some systems work well with local mirrors, others, not so much. You can't even do things as simple as an web search. And no remote work, obviously.
Usually, on the side, you have a second computer that is connected to the internet and use a USB stick to transfer stuff back and forth, with varying level of security during the back and forth. You may have a third computer in the middle for instance, with a variety of anti-malware tools on it, to analyze the content of the USB stick before transferring its content to the airgapped network, it may also involve some paperwork.

And there is more than manufacturing and marketing. There is also HR, which may be even more sensitive than manufacturing. It is not my thing, but I guess that managing a payroll without internet access is not an easy task, with banks, government and tax services, and general communication happening mostly online.

And yeah, forget about cloud services like Google Docs and Office 365 (that part should be obvious), but even the regular Office suite is a hassle. In fact, you should probably avoid Windows and Apple in general. So, LibreOffice and Linux I guess, which is great, but that's not what most people are familiar with, and not the platform of choice for management software. LLMs? Lolno.

Because cloud services are out, IT should be done in house, and competent sysadmins are not cheap. And you need your own servers, offsite backups, etc... with the appropriate level of physical security.

That's the Godwin point for you.

Bitcoin has an official symbol present in Unicode, many people use Bitcoin in some form or another, consider it a legitimate currency, and want to put it in a spreadsheet.

LibreOffice is productivity software, not a political statement about cryptocurrencies, so if people need it, just add it to the list. As for the others, again, it depends on usage.

You, Jamie Dimon, are losing, because Europe doesn't do what you want it to do.

Europe is under no obligation to play the same game as you do.

And yet, for some reason, zoonoses didn't happen before livestock farming. Or at least, it was not significant enough to leave genetic traces. It means that there is more to it than "life can adapt, duh".

To support this theory, when Europeans arrived in America, they brought a whole lot of devastating diseases with them, but the natives didn't return the favor. The difference: Europeans have been living with livestock for centuries suffered the plagues that went with it, and developed immunities, the natives, not so much. It means that the mere presence of animals is not enough for diseases to transmit to humans, but herding is.

And I don't know why you are getting political. Yeah, covid, lab leak, etc... there will always be a bunch of conspiracy nuts who disregard scientific data that may contradict their story. But if we put aside covid for a moment, there is whole list of them where the origin is relatively uncontested and not political.

Public domain is going to be a problem considering the quality of recordings before 1930. There is plenty of music composed before 1930, but if you are using a recent recording, the performer still has copyright.

But there are already companies that sell cheap subscriptions (in the order of $10/month) for music that is not covered by performance rights organizations and that you can play in bars and restaurants. Maybe acceptable for background music, but definitely not the same quality and recognition as mainstream artists, think elevator music.

Also to make people talk louder, which causes dry mouth, which makes people thirsty so that they order more drinks.

The problem is that we don't have a better theory than dark matter to explain the motion of galaxies, although MOND and its derivatives are a close second.

A good theory must explain all observations with the least amount of free parameters. And dark matter is actually quite good in that regard: we have stuff that is massive and that we currently can't detect except for its gravitational effect on galaxies, and a particle is currently the favorite candidate. I mean, why not, neutrinos were like that not so long ago, and in fact, neutrinos have been considered dark matter candidates. So we are looking for particles that are both good dark matter candidates, and that we can build detectors for. Not finding these particles does not disprove dark matter, it just means that among the things dark matter could be, one of them is not.

For all we know, dark matter may be a particle that only interacts gravitationally, which physicists call a "nightmare scenario", because it is a very real possibility, and because gravity is so weak, we may never have the technology needed to detect it, at least for the foreseeable future.

And most of the times, they are right. It is a big reason Apple is worth trillions, so that users can rely on Apple to give them what's best for them without having to mess with settings. I remember my family doctor, who was quite a geek and had a PC at home. But in his office, he had a Mac, because that computer was for doing his job and he didn't want to be bothered by anything else.

I don't know if Apple is as good as it once was, but I think they are still among the best. The *did* change the problematic "liquid glass" design after all. Microsoft on the other hand is a complete mess. Not only they don't have the taste of Apple, but they don't compensate by giving you much choice either.

I completely agree with the "change for change's sake" problem though. I think it is marketing. Someone told me once that if you didn't change the UI, you didn't change anything. So maybe your new product is much better but if it looks the same, people won't buy it.

No it is not scientific.

Science is about facts, not policies. Ideally, policies are decided based on these facts, but at that point, it stops becoming science and it becomes politics.

A scientist's job is not to support a politician over another, decide on budgets, or anything like that. What a scientist can do however is point out the possible consequences of a policy, backed with data and using proper methodology. He can make recommendations on what to do to achieve a certain goal, referencing relevant scientific results, but not decide what to do with these. Scientists don't oppose, they falsify, it means they can point out lies and other statements that don't align with facts, but by itself, a political decision is not something that can be falsified even if the context can be.

Now, scientists are also people, they can engage in politics, have opinions, and of course, they need to pay their bills. But here, we are talking about scientists as people, not science as an activity. Politics about science is not science.

Smoke is bad for the lungs, it can come from smoking or it can come from other sources. There is nothing particular about smoking, it is just a particularly bad case of self-inflicted air pollution.

It doesn't mean the study is worthless of course, we still need to quantify this, and the results may have been surprising, but as it turns out, they are not.

The reason people don't release music on CD is because it is inconvenient. It has value as a collector's item, but if you just want to listen to music, a digital file that you can put on a USB stick, your phone, computer, etc... is so much more convenient. Streaming is even more so if you have internet access.

At first, the music industry fought hard to keep CDs relevant, it was a time when downloading meant piracy. They then tried to offer their own (paid/legal) download platforms, with DRM, no one wanted that and many switched to DRM-free MP3s (the very thing they wanted to kill) for that reason. Now, it is all about streaming.

The music industry lost the battle on copy protection, they may even have lost the war. They are now doing the smart thing and offer a product (streaming) that is convenient enough and affordable enough that people don't even want to copy. There is still some DRM, but it is more of a suggestion, people who want to copy will.

Cars last about 10 years on average, 10 years ago, CD players were a standard feature in most cars, and many of these cars are still on the road.

My current car don't, but my previous car (2004 model) had a cassette player! It was already outdated in 2004, but it was the cheaper option, so that's what I got. By the end of its life (2018), it was completely obsolete but I could still use it if I wanted to.

SpaceX *is* doing pretty well, despite the spectacular failures.

The problem is all about Elon Musk communication. To put it bluntly, he is a manipulative bastard. But the rockets, yes, they are fine, very good actually. I don't know how much SpaceX got in state funding, but probably a lot more than meets the eye. Again, I don't consider it a bad thing, US rocketry had been an international joke between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9. The people who put a man on the moon have their astronauts travel on a Russian rocket, come on... of course the state should put their money in a company that can actually build rockets! But it didn't stop Elon Musk from bad mouthing the government, and going back to the article, "pretending that space is easy".

Just don't listen to Elon Musk hype and you will save yourself a lot of trouble. He has some technical skills though, so on that ground, he has interesting things to say, unfortunately, most of what we hear about from him is not that, with exceptions, like Tim Dodd visit to SpaceX on YouTube.