Well, the use case is clearly to produce binaries with smaller memory footprint. But *I* didn't even notice that Debian had disabled it.

Lazy, yes. Bright, no. If you can't trust the average person to figure out that bread that's loaded with salt and sugar isn't healthy, then you can't trust the average person to figure out what a healthy balanced meal is.

The evolutionary pattern was created because food was unreliable and energy demands were unpredictable - but high, due to the large brain. (Possibly larger than it is today, but there seems to be conflicting data there.)

Now, rationing extreme energy foods is certainly one option, but it's not a particularly satisfactory one as the energy demands vary by profession and by time within a profession. You simply can't predict what people will need and there's no way to standardise this.

There is a second option. Intense focus is impossible for beyond about 45-90 minutes at a stretch, or for more than 3-5 hours in a day. Meetings degrade intelligence, according to psychological research, so you want to minimise those. After about 7 hours, work will mostly have negative value. If you increase the amount of high physical activity for at least an hour a day (and potentially longer if the amount of soft work is minimal in the job) then you will improve physical fitness and general health, without having to substantially alter diet. However, that still only gets you so far, because a poor diet still impacts physical and mental health, and can lead to brain decline. (It's a big factor in poor brain health in children in schools.)

A third option, then, is to actually improve meal quality in schools and for workplaces to work with the food industry to provide cheaper/easier access to high quality foods that actually taste good, not merely sensible energy foods. This would seem to be target solution, with in-work exercise to supplement it.

FWIW, if they want to class insecticides as "toxins", I think they're probably right. Also plasticizers. And likely a few other industrial chemicals that aren't properly cleaned up.

If that turns out to be the case, we get to find out something about what reshaping the brain means.

Whilst that is perfectly true, it is questionable as to whether it is useful or necessary. If a rocket is being tested, then logically it should be heavily instrumented. If it's heavily instrumented, and the instruments are themselves competently designed, there is no obvious reason why the engine can't be auto-cut when problems start to arise. And they will have arisen long long before the explosion.

The values may have independently been "within permitted range", but if the pattern of those values doesn't make sense, then something has gone wrong. There may well also have been subsystems that were insufficiently instrumented.

"They're the experts" is often an irrelevancy - we lost TWO shuttles and crews to political decisions, when the experts on the ground were ignored. DeHavilland lost endless Comets to basically the same blunder, when political decisions by management over the reality of metal fatigue overrode analysis by actual experts. Improper monitoring and inadequate computer controls will be from a burden of costs and time (both political constraints, not engineering constraints). As, indeed, will improperly manufactured parts, improper software (anyone rememebr Arianne IV's mishap due to buggy software?), improperly-defined constraints, and inadequate quality controls.

The experts are usually either well aware of mistakes or afforded no means of detecting them.

I see no reason not to think this was anything other than a management blunder.

Well, a baseball bat *is* a deadly weapon, if used as a weapon.

OTOH, when arguing about whether it's a bomb the definitions of the terms are less clear. And when arguing about whether it's an explosion, high energy chemists/engineers will have a different definition than folks who don't deal with the details.

To me, it's an explosion. If some professional wants to say "No, it's a deflagration." I'm not going to say he's wrong, but I'm not wrong either. We're just speaking different dialects of English.

Well, that would strongly reduce future harm...but no the harm they've already done.

If you're willing to settle for only $30 million, that should be enough to obtain a birth certificate and proof of residency in some remote village.

The CIA can't just make arrests on US soil. They actually do need the FBI to do that. That's another form of oversight.

He told his Ferengi superior that he could keep the latinum.

That's not clear. The problems are real, but some of them already have solutions, and perhaps the others will eventually have solutions also. Also all of the alternatives have their own problems.

The folks working on sodium based batteries have made tremendous progress recently, but there's no proof that analogous advances aren't possible for lithium. At any particular time, you weigh your options, and decide based on the choices available, but that doesn't tell you what the choices will be next week. For that matter, lab results often don't scale commercially. So take this article with a few grains of salt.

Actually lithium should make more powerful and lighter batteries. That's been known for nearly a century. The details come when it turns to practical design.

I forget the details, but I seem to recall that lithium should be half again as powerful per unit weight as sodium. (That might be an underestimate.) But this doesn't include things like flammability, growth of metallic extrusions, etc. Dealing with the details can easily be enough to change that balance.

This raises a very important question. If the CIA are taking shortcuts and making assumptions about anything, we should not be making assumptions ourselves that the CIA aren't doing the same elsewhere. I am, however, still waiting for biolabs and WMDs to turn up in Iraq - something for which they appear to have ALSO taken one person's unsupported word for. They also ratted out their own officers in retaliation for questioning the existence of "yellowcake" (that turned out not to exist).

I'd be wary of claiming there was a pattern, but... They do seem awfully incompetent.