The IRS runs heavily on ancient technology. I wish it were better, but moving people who know how those ancient systems work is asking for trouble.

But with this group, that might be the point. Make the IRS dysfunctional so it can be scaled back, or at least so that they're spending so much time cleaning up messes that they're not doing audits of the most complex taxpayers.

The apostles who knew Jesus didn't write letters, or at least any that survived. There's a very strong chance that most or even all except Matthew were illiterate, which was common at the time. (As a tax collector, Matthew would have needed to read and write.) Paul wrote letters, as did someone claiming to be Paul. But there are no known, confirmed surviving writings from any of the apostles who personally knew Jesus. The Gospel of Luke may have been written or at least dictated by Luke, but we have no way to know for sure. It was likely edited in some fashion, possibly with the first two chapters added by someone else. In addition, there are some significant variations in certain phrases between some of the earliest versions. In any case, the earliest known fragments are from the mid- to late-second century CE, so there are several decades between the deaths of the apostles and the earliest versions we have of the gospels in which editing could have taken place.

The government shouldn't have ownership of any company except in extreme instances such as what happened with the Great Recession where certain companies completely collapsing would bring too many others down, and then only long enough to stabilize it and get it back in private hands. Now, every time Intel gets a government contract, there's going to be questions about whether it was a fair competition. Every time they get a grant, there will be questions about favoritism. Every time the board bends to government demands, there will be questions about improper influence. TARP made me extremely uncomfortable in how many companies it had the government buy into, but it was also designed to be short-term. The Intel acquisition, even as a minority share, was clearly not meant to be short-term.

Qualcomm needs to be kept away from Intel. If they get it, I'm sure they'll soon start to wind down x86 development and production in favor of their ARM chips, which will put far too much of the overall chip industry under one roof. It could also put AMD at risk, and potentially mean that one company eventually controls virtually all US chip design and manufacturing.

Fish is definitely something they've been working on for developing scaffolding. There was a paper last year by Kang, et. al, "Development of cultivated fish meat: Advances in cellular agriculture, biomaterials, and scaffolding techniques," that summarized the current state of the art.

Your jest isn't really that biting. A quarter-pounder with cheese at McDonald's is $5.49 for just the burger. A medium drink is another $1.79. The quarter-pounder meal is $8.69. Yeah, you get fries with it, but the number you came up with isn't all that expensive compared to actual fast food.

They're not growing fat *yet*. There is research going into scaffolding for multiple tissue types, including fat. That research may ultimately also benefit human health, because scaffolding for multiple tissues is a major challenge in cloning organs.

I live in Texas. They just straight up banned it. Companies can technically still research it, and they can serve it as part of the research, but they can't scale up to production, making even the research mostly pointless.

The fact that Western Digital has already sold its entire manufacturing run for 2026 and is already selling 2027 and 2028, and that this is not major news on the tech sites supports your assertion. I suspect Seagate and the others are in similar situations. I really need to replace my NAS (an old QNAP that I've had for 12 years), but it's going to be painful.

Or a prepaid retainer agreement with an expiration date for hours and a cap on hours worked per day and per week, waivable only in writing when confirmed by both parties. That way, they can't rush to jam in all the hours with 12-hour days at the end of the year.

His cryptocoin is down 93%. But it was just another way to funnel money into his pockets anyway.

it's currently a currency that is needed to buy oil worldwide

Oil is priced in dollars by convention, but there is no requirement to buy it using dollars outside of what individual countries require for their trade. Oil is regularly traded in other currencies including euros, Indian rupees, Chinese yuan, and Russian rubles, with non-dollar oil trading covering about 20% of the global market. The US dollar is relatively stable, though, so it serves as a useful reference for other currencies, and using it directly to conduct oil trades keeps things simple.

That's what we explained. We'll give them access where necessary. Their response was a constant series of what-ifs.

"But what if I need to fix something?" That's what test and UAT are for.

"But what if it worked in UAT but not in prod?" Then figure out what makes prod different from UAT (they're supposed to be identical), apply it to UAT, break UAT, fix UAT, deploy to prod.

"But what if it's an emergency?" We can make an exception at the time.

"But what if you're not fast enough?" We can get it done in half an hour max. Nothing you're working on is going to cause that much of an emergency if it's down an extra 30 minutes.

"But what if--?" Please stop.

Trump doesn't use email, and he never has.

And as of last summer, NIST recommends against complex passwords and expiration while calling for a 15-character minimum. Forced password changes should happen only when they're suspected to have been compromised.

>Trans people are less than 1/10 that. This means that it's easy to go your entire life without ever knowing one.

Treatments are getting a lot better, so the odds that you know one are a bit higher than you might think. But knowing that you know one is harder because the treatments are better and because they're unwilling to bring it up. When gay marriage was legalized in the US, a lot of people only realized that they had gay friends and family because wedding announcements started coming. It caused a lot of people -- some of whom had been actual leaders of movements against gay marriage -- to rethink things.

I was hired in part to write my employer's IT security policies and standards, and to guide the various IT groups in building their procedure documentation. Most of it has gone reasonably well since I started mostly with established methods and tightening things here and there. There have been some areas of contention, but the things that have received the most pushback are around development. For example, the idea that developers for enterprise systems with deployment tiers (dev, test, UAT, prod) should not have direct, full-time access to prod sparked heated debate. In addition, a couple of groups seem to be about to start a political fight over the idea that they should document some basic practices like allowed programming languages, minimum versions of those languages, security features like ASLR, and compiler settings. I've been accused of trying to dictate their development environment, but I'm just trying to get them to write down what they're already doing and agree to set some minimums on their own. The only thing that I've "imposed" is that any library or platform they use for new projects should be officially supported so that they're not writing new Python 2 or .NET 3 code.

> You got virus checkers and software solutions to handle the technical stuff, the hard part is to convince the damn receptionist to stop buying from spam mails, because THATS where most of the damage comes from.

It's not the receptionists that we have to worry about so much as middle management. We get more compromises at that level than at the lower tiers.