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.

The mass of 2024 YR4 is estimated to be in the range of 2.8e8 kg, or about 280,000 tons, near the weight of three fully loaded US supercarriers. The mass of the moon is about 7.3e22 kg. That's about 14 orders of magnitude.

RUs1729 suggested below that this is like "a fly impinging on an incoming locomotive." A housefly has a mass of about 20 mg (2.0e-2 g) on the larger end of the scale. The heaviest railway train ever operated was an ore carrier in Australia that had a total mass of just under 100,000 metric tons, or about 1.0e11 g. That's 13 orders of magnitude difference.

The effect of this asteroid hitting the moon would be roughly in the range a housefly hitting the heaviest locomotive train ever used, and quite possibly less. Maybe you're aware of a housefly dislodging a train somewhere, but I've not heard of it.

The pressure differential for a space station doesn't need to be above one atmosphere. You reach that at 10 m underwater.

> no need to mine salt, it's everywhere

Most salt that we use is mined. Desalinization is expensive. It's cheaper and faster to use heavy machinery to dig it out of the ground. There's a mine in New York that produces 18,000 tons a day, and that's just one of several large mines in the US alone.

Promethium's natural availability is around 1e-15 ppm of the Earth's crust. It's actually cheaper to make it by bombarding uranium and then isolating the products to make the sub-kilogram annual volumes needed to meet commercial demand.

Salt mines are even easier and cheaper, and they're located all over the world, often well away from oceans (Austria, Switzerland, and Kazakhstan all produce several hundred thousand tons or more per year from mines and salt flats). There's a mine in New York that produces 18,000 tons of salt per day. Remove the chlorine, and that's 7,000 tons of sodium per day from just one location.

That's the case with every single one. I was not terribly impressed by AI three or four years ago. It's gotten better, but I really think that it's plateaued in its capabilities. There are still improvements happening, but nothing so far like the shift we saw when ChatGPT first hit most people's radar. The coming changes are likely to be more subtle and focus on accuracy and focused tasks.

For all the worries about massive job displacement, it hasn't happened. At my workplace, people were almost screaming for access to the enterprise AIs. Most use them for a few weeks, and then usage drops to zero, or close to it. If we had let everyone have it a year ago, we would have had to buy thousands of licenses. We have several hundred, but really only about 100 seriously use it. No jobs have been cut in favor of AI. No one has closed a job req because AI could do it. Academic studies are showing that the supposed cost savings aren't there. That's not to say that no one else has fired people in favor of AI, but I think it was used more as an excuse in most cases to cut positions that had built up and were already seen as excess. It was better PR (or at least they thought it was) to say that it was due to AI rather than good old-fashioned cost-cutting.

The fertility rate in the US has been below replacement level since 1972, except for a handful of years. It started to decline with the Great Recession, and it continued a steady decline until 2022. It blipped up in 2024, but it's still not enough.