Did he offer any covid-related advice other than warning people? The article does not say.

The article quotes him as saying "I also thought", not "I have been saying".

The guy was an successful influencer, and this is one of the oldest tricks in the book. If you want to convince people that X is false, then you say "I used to believe X, but after Z I've realized that X is false."

Many slashdotters would prefer to write. "People who believe X are idiots. X is obviously untrue because of Z." This may seem like a stronger statement. But those whose opinion you would like to change are likely to downmod after reading the first sentence, and never even get to the second one.

The first story does not identify the company, other than saying that it's fairly large ("40+ devs"), but if that story is actually true, then it seems likely that the two are the same. Otherwise I think we would have heard from the customers of a second company affected by an outage.

I can't imagine any company being honest enough to put out a press release saying "We lost our customers' data because we put the root credentials of the production database in a training document, and we didn't have working backups." And calling the new guy an "ex admin" would technically be true, since they fired him.

No. "TV" and "smart TV" are not the only two options. Back in the 60's a TV, by definition, received in black and white, so if you want to be specific, you'll have to call your TV a "color TV", and people did that for a while. Similarly the word "TV" was frequently prefixed with "widescreen", "flatscreen" and "smart" during periods of time. When you say "TV" today, you mean something very different from when the word was invented.

The English language has a long history of shortening "adjective noun" to just "noun" once the adjective becomes common enough that it's essentially pleonastic.

I already call my flatscreen TV a "TV", and my digital camera a "camera", so I find it convenient to call my smartphone a "phone".

Maybe not.

The Cooper hijacking was in 1971. The "U.S. will not yield to blackmail" doctrine was instated by Carter during the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis.

Well, from a frequentist perspective, the probability is either 100 % or 0 %, depending on the disc was indeed HP or not. But the witness didn't know this, nor did he know the personal taste of the driver.

From a Bayesian perspective, it depends on what assumptions we make. If we assume that the probability that a film was selected is proportional to its box office performance then the probability is on the order of 1/1000. Since people are more likely to watch movies that they haven't seen before, the probability of a recent release is much higher than an older one. (This does not apply to people who cannot afford new DVDs or to boring people who could afford to buy new things but don't. Neither of those would own a Tesla.)

Even if we also assume that Tesla owners only watch DVD's of films released in 2011, then the only goes up to 3 %. Still low enough that it would be significant if the witness was right.

The witness says a Harry Potter movie was playing. If he was making this up, then there's a less than one in a thousand chance that the DVD player actually contains a disc with a Harry Potter movie. (The last disc of the series was released on DVD in 2011. A Tesla owner would be much more likely to be watching a more recent release.)

Investigators know which disc was in the player, so they know if the witness is telling the truth.

Indeed, autopilots on boats kill people all the time. (Most common case, the guy falls overboard while taking a pee and the autopilot sails away, leaving him to drown.) Yet I've never heard of anyone arguing that they should be banned (or even that they should only be allowed on boats with indoor plumbing).

What we need is for the world's environmentalists to realize that energy storage and infrastructure projects are more important the solar cells and wind farms themselves.

When an environmentalist engineer says to an environmentalist politician that "This $100 million solar farm will be useless unless we also invest $500 million in energy storage and infrastructure" the response will always be "Why are you bashing solar cells? I'm firing you and replacing you with someone who cares about the environment." rather than "OK, I guess I'll have to find another $500 million in funding".

Signal strength decreases with distance squared, so a 12 kW signal from a balloon 20 000 meters away is as weak as a 0.3 W signal from a WiFi router 100 meters away.

Fortunately German courts are not quite stupid enough to accept that as a valid excuse for what is very clearly unsolicited advertising. (FTFY)

In many countries, free speech wins over consumer protection. A notable example is the USA, where "corporations are people".

It would seem they compensate for the tiny rotors with very high rpm. Increadibly noisy, and creates enormous forces on the rotor blades, but theoretically possible. The video states that they need 1 MW of power for lift-off, and that the engine provides 0.2 MW (300 hp), so it would take 0.8 MW worth of batteries. They're probably lithium polymer, like in miniature helicopters.

He wouldn't be. According to TFA, there would be an exception for people with "academic affiliations" as well as for the press, and anybody else with an audience.

If your read between the lines it's pretty clear that he's saying that only muslims could go to jail for being rickrolled, and that's OK, because think of the children!

"it can be more than 20%" -Yeah, it can be an infinite number of %, if the actual distance travelled is zero, and the random error is not.