It's a hard answer. By stating "You will categorically not be paid if you try to ransom us", you're cutting out the part of organised crime that does stuff for a profit. There will be no profit in attacking a hospital. They will not pay, and you'll take an awful lot of heat for no return (and potentially be liable for any deaths that occur if they eventually catch you, increasing the sentence that's meted out to you).

However, there is still the vulnerability to politically motivated attacks, so safety still isn't assured, it just demotivates regular organised crime that just wants to make lots of money.

Having backups, and having tested backups is pretty much what everyone has.
The critical thing that people are finding is the metric to follow with Ransomware attacks is the Recovery Time for the entire estate. Not one system, but potentially hundreds of interlinked systems that all fail catastrophically at once.
That can take weeks of forensics to work out what's happened (and needs to be done before you can make an effective recovery, otherwise you may find you're back at still being compromised and ransom attacked within minutes of being back online). Then it can take weeks or months to recover and sync all the systems affected.

All the while, your primary business (in hospitals, for example, keeping people alive) is in measures that most likely can't handle the load long term with paper based recording and tracking. They certainly will have difficulty managing planned appointments and making new ones, which is why many business continuity plans have a time scale by which a given system needs to be recovered, or else things go south quickly after that period.

I've read so many people saying "should have had backups", but nobody has considered the time to rebuild from catastrophic failure. Every system and server is down, full restore and recovery to a time before infection (and validation of that).
The company was a transport company with 500 trucks on the road. That's a lot of logistics in play that need to have continuity, each one with cost of probably tens of thousands a day, or more, with heavy non-complete penalties for failure.
Full catastrophic failure can take weeks, or months to perform. In this time, you've haemorrhaged customers, who have had to try and make alternate arrangements where they can (and will likely not be back), no ability to schedule new business, and bills that still need to be paid.

The cash flow can easily drive a low margin business like transport into failure just by the time to recover from a complete loss of function by malicious infection. All the backups may be there, they may even have off site, and have done everything by the book, just the operating company as an entity could easily lose more in the recovery time window than it was possible to financially recover from.

For a long time now, that kind of money has been mainly bandied about in the Sports leagues. Expensive players getting huge signing bonuses to join new teams..
I always wondered what it would take to get that kind of money for the scientists; looks like there's finally something that people really want to spend their cash on.
IT may only be for a short time (after all, anologously to sport, there is likely to be a short window of opportunity for this kind of cash, so you may find it's a short career, but if you invest well, it can last you a lifetime to do what you want afterwards), but it's good to see.

I suspect it's also a sign that the big players also see it as a limited time deal, with AI starting to tail off and stabilise as a tool in the not too distant future (5, maybe 10 years if that), and the disruption settling down into a newer way of operating. They're just going all out at the moment to get the best talent to be in the big player stakes when that happens (if it does; there's still no guarantee, but it's an interesting gamble).

It's the planning, and designing the equipment to let the jump happen.
Without the jump, all that wouldn't have happened (for a while at least).
Him stepping up, and actually doing it, advanced knowledge and engineering, proving that it could be done. Not a huge advance, but definitely a tiptoe in a new direction.

So, you would have the young vote against their own interests to help the aged (who really do need help) as well?
Everyone votes with what they believe will work best both for themselves and for everyone. Believing that just because someone votes other than the way you think they ought to shows that you have a massive bias. I've literally voted for every major party in the UK, all based on manifestos of what they say they're going to attempt to do, on the basis that I think that manifesto makes the most sense for the state of the country at the time.

Honestly don't care if there's been a GenX president, as I'm not from the USA. I'm fairly sure there will be at some point.

The ability to derail a train if you hit the rear brakes while the engine is going full out. The system is designed to safely apply rear brakes at the same time as the forward brakes, ensuring the whole of the train experiences a braking effect.

The courses used to be fully funded by a grant here in the UK. All you needed was to have the academic credentials to get in, and that was the tough part. About 15% of people went on to higher education (in the early 80s); the theory was that over your working life, you'd more than repay to the government in taxes what was spent on your training for your reasonably "high flying" job. Which was fairly true.
The wonderful thing about that was that selection was entirely on how academically competent you were (rather than practically competent, which was more for vocations and apprenticeships); it opened up social mobility quite nicely.

Then more courses were added. with increasingly niche and impractical subjects, many of which had a handful of hours of lectures a week, and by the mid 90s, about 25% of the school leavers went to University. The government decided it could no longer afford to send all these people to Uni, so introduced Student Loans instead of Grant, which had the immediate effect of starting to dissuade the poorer (though sometimes academically gifted) people from going to Uni.
Then after that in 1998 came tuition fees which needed to be paid (introduced by a Labour government, who were the last ones anyone would think would do this due to the chilling effect on social mobility that the extra financial encumbrance brought).

As parents weren't used to the eye-wateringly high cost of higher education that existed in places like the US, there was only so much that could be politically asked of people to pay, so course fees were capped. Still too expensive for poor, and quite a millstone around the necks of recent graduates.

All the increased degree taking (around 50% of the UK population now have degrees by the time they're 30) means degrees aren't worth what they were, and command far less salary, rendering them not such a great pathway (except you now almost need a degree to flip burgers in McDonalds).

Seeing as there's a limited amount of people you can funnel through the degree channel, and the cap definitely hasn't been keeping up with inflation, then something needs to give. Fixed costs of buildings and utilities remain the same, so the only factor left is to reduce the courses and the academic staff involved with those (fewer courses means fewer administrators, along with fewer lecturers).
I don't think most families see the allure of vastly higher tuition fees that would allow Universities to continue in their current mode, as the return on investment simply isn't there. Apprenticeships are starting to find the appeal that they used to have (two of the most successful youngsters that I know did Engineering apprenticeships, and are now on salaries not far short of mine, while I know a boatload of Degree graduates with crippling debt over their heads, and without the grounding to do a role that would pay that back in any comfortable timespan.

Couple this with the financial crash of 2009 (which is having a generational financial impact) and COVID (which will definitely be having a generational financial impact), there really isn't the money anywhere to pass along to these institutions.

No, in general, they don't.. The old tend to try and look out for the young, and help where they can.. That's been my experience anyway..

These days, it's a few hundred to get the equipment to interact with this system. When it was invented, computer security was barely even thought about, and the equipment to exploit it would have been extremely expensive (if you could even get it outside industry).

Technology does that. Efficient engineering and the like, finding ways to do far more with far less resource. A reducing population isn't a good sign for long term cohesion of a society.

The reason houses are more expensive is that prices are now predicated on two incomes.
A generation or so ago, when women by and large created the communities and support structures of the first world, the price of a house was predicated on one income. Childcare was also communal (where you could leave a child with a friend if you both needed to be doing something).
The actual cost of the job that women were doing (and yes, I do consider making a home and community as a job) is now being seen, and unless you have a well paid job, childcare will easily eat one salary if you have two or more kids.

So now, people are leaving it later to try and have kids, in order to be financially viable in the new market conditions. Sadly, quite a few are realising they've left it a little late.

As Glyphosate is not toxic (apart from repeatedly swimming in it and guzzling it by the pints daily) to mammals.
The whole reason it's frowned on is because Lawyers got involved, and because scientists couldn't say "Without a doubt, Glyphosate does not cause cancer" it got marked as a carcinogen. There again, scientists will never say "without a doubt", as there is always room for doubt in anything but the most settled of science, after decades or centuries of analysis. The data shows Glyphosate as being safe, and it being "extremely unlikely" that there is any connection between normal exposure to Glyphosate and cancer. It's one of the safest herbicides around, if not the safest for mammals. So it's no surprise that anything that is used instead is more toxic.

Don't forget technical debt. Those excel spreadsheets and what not work fine for a while. When a version of excel makes some change, or deprecates part of the code used, or someone wants to put it in a proper system where the data isn't siloed, all hell breaks loose. And seeing as there are lots of these things around in an average enterprise, it can get to be a real headache.

You've pretty much just described a light form of RAD tools, giving that level of detail. And they've been translating logic to code since the '90s.