Also, right of ownership should criminally penalize companies for stealing functionality in stuff they already sold you.

I don't very often wish I had mod points, but this is an exceptional case.

Yes, but that won't happen until we get everyone on the same page moving forward in a fault-tolerant and robust expectations paradigm. In order to action that, we need to empower and enstrengthen key team players and integrate a results-forward meritocracy with our strategic core competencies; and if we could count on you to be on board, that would be great.

"some pain" probably means a lot of people dying and maybe even the return of slavery. We could make utopia, but we won't.

The pronoun people aren't the fascist; obviously they're more Marxist instead. They do share some authoritarian tendencies with MAGA though. (See "horseshoe theory".) Moreover, their contempt for the narrative of American freedom is their undoing... yeah, America was never a perfectly free nation, but people who fought for freedom and pressed for freedom under that narrative routinely won it.

Maybe Libertarians can use the current crisis to finally achieve their political ascendency, but they'll have to learn the value of coalition and cooperation first, which aren't exactly their strong suit. Still, America needs saving from fasiscm, and I don't see the pronoun crowd getting the job done.

Paris was lovely... at least the tourist parts are. Saw way less sketchy types than I was expecting. Felt safer there than several other big cities in Europe and USA (despite all the crowds and pickpocket warnings). Saw zero Palestinian protestors, for instance.

That's the official line, but it's a blatant lie.

To the extent that Google cares about account recovery at all, they want it to go away, and you get a new account every time you get a new phone. They've been systematically *removing* ways to recover accounts. Among other things, you can't do it with an automated computer-generated-voice call (that reads you a one-time code) any more, and for a while now you haven't been able to do it with just your password once they have your phone number: you have to have the phone (or at least the same phone number), or the account is dead, full stop. Additionally, they keep making it harder and harder to log into your account from multiple different devices, because they do NOT want you doing that. They want every account tied inexorably to a specific individual smartphone, preferably an Android phone (though they also work with Apple, reluctantly, because Apple users are ridiculously loyal and too numerous and too moneyed to completely ignore). For the time being, if you've given them an email address that goes to a third-party email account (from e.g. an ISP or employer), you can still get a one-time code sent to that account every time, and thus log into the Google account from wherever you are on the network; but I expect that option to go away before too many more months pass. Also, needing to do it kind of defeats the main purpose of GMail. You *should* be able to just log in with your password, but that's no longer allowed, unless you are on the same device you've used before. So if you're ever going to get a new phone, better do it before you lose the old one, or the Google account will die.

I am *guessing* that the motivation behind all this, may have something to do with smartphone apps, and the lucrative nature thereof; but this is a guess.

I know people who still *try* to use Google, and then they invariably come to me asking why it can't find what they're looking for any more, or why it gives the wrong answer now, or whatever. And I'm like "They decided to get out of the web search business, because they think there's going to be more money in AI." And the users just look at me confused, because they don't know what any of that means. "But why doesn't my Google work any more?" Eh, keep it simple: "Because Google is broken. It's not just you, it's broken for everyone."

What I wish I could give them, is another search engine that works anywhere near as well as Google did in 2021 or so. But there isn't one.

False equivalence... democracy-autocracy is a scale, and there's a difference between having a persistent cough that pesters your day and having to be intubated because you can't breath and your O2 is dropping. And now technology is opening new avenues for totalitarianism than the Stasi could have ever dreamed of.

Or you could just, you know, fill out a 1040. It takes about ten minutes. A bit longer if you've never done it before.

People are irrationally afraid of it because there are so many horror stories out there about people spending hours and hours and hours trudging through financial records trying to figure out their taxes, but most of those stories are heavily exaggerated, and 100% of them are from people whose finances are *way* more complicated than average, because they own a business or have a bunch of fancy investments or whatever. For a regular person who has a regular job and gets a regular W-2 from your employer, it's really not a big deal. Though of course if most of what you know about it comes from the advertising from Intuit and H&R Block, you wouldn't know that.

A few decades ago, the vote would've gone heavily in favor of requiring car dealerships to be locally owned; but at this point, I imagine a lot of Ohio voters would kinda shrug and check one of the options more or less at random. If there are still a lot of people here who care deeply about the issue, I'm not aware of it. (Maybe among the remaining members "silent generation"?) Ohio consumers have thoroughly embraced large chains (such as Meijer and Menard's and Ollie's and so on) for most of their brick-and-mortar retail needs, and the distinction between a franchise chain and a corporately owned chain is too subtle for most voters, given that the only way to even distinguish them from one another is by doing research on them.

Ideally, there should not have been a special exception carved out for Tesla in particular, in the first place. Either Tesla should have been held to the same rules as everyone else, or else the rule should have just been changed. Any time government rules treat specific companies differently from everyone else, I see that as a sign of corruption and bad governance (although "bad" is relative; there is of course much *worse* governance in some parts of the world, than what we have in Ohio).

Yeah, came here to say basically the same thing. We're talking about a _really_ nitrogen-dense compound here. If you look at the general level of stability of other small-molecule compounds with a high percentage of nitrogen by weight, and then someone says "OBTW I synthesized N6", the natural reaction is to flee the county. In that context, if it's possible to warm it above about 20 kelvin and turn on the light in the room without the stuff going kablooey, it's suprisingly stable. I've been known to joke about a nitrogen-based analog to the fullerines, but I didn't seriously think anyone would try to *make* something like that.

I remember events somewhat differently: they first encouraged people not to buy up n95 masks because it was more important that healthcare workers have them. That was true. Then they said homemade/cloth masks don't work, and that was also true in the sense that a mask doesn't provide the wearer with reliable protection from COVID. But then they realized that maybe it did "work" in the sense of reducing the infection rate, particularly when worn by infected persons. That is somewhat true... certainty it was a reasonable guess and a valid change in tactics even though later studies cast doubt on how worthwhile it was. You see "liars", but I see public health officials scrambling to make the best decisions (within the framework of their medical understanding) while working with a lot of unknowns in a serious, quickly changing situation. If course, it didn't help that some politicians were overzealous and/or hypocritical in applying mask mandates. Localities that closed public beaches, for instance, were clearly being absurd. It's the job of a politician to balance competing concerns (medicine vs economics, for instance), and there were many who did a shit job.

I'm assuming they have some physical backups somewhere, yes. But they'll probably be at least several days out of date.

The *daily* backups were almost certainly the 10TB of backups that were found and destroyed by the attackers. Which makes sense: you want your most frequent backups to be fully 100% automated so they're as up to date as possible whenever a hard drive dies (which, for most organizations, happens considerably more often than this kind of successful malicious attack). So your continuous and daily backups go onto media that are online 24/7. So when something like this happens, you're going to have to go back to the last time a secondary backup was made, and that's less automated (among other things, someone has to physically swap the media in and out, and if we're talking about 10TB of data, that's probably going to have to happen multiple times, over the course of a couple of days, to complete the backup), so it generally happens less frequently. Since this was a munitions factory, we can charitably assume they would have known they were a potential target for this sort of thing, and so probably would have at least done a secondary backup weekly? Probably. Most organizations don't have their sysadmins practice restoring from secondary backups on anything resembling a regular basis, so they won't really know what they're doing and will run into all sorts of minor-but-annoying setbacks and delays. Software that's needed won't be installed, and there won't be a complete list of it anywhere, so they'll have to fool around by trial and error figuring out why blah-blah-blah won't run, oh, we forgot to install foolib on the design department's database server, have to do that, ok, now why does it still not run, oh, it also wants the foolib extensions for Postgres, install that, rinse, repeat. Some data that are stored in oddball locations (typically, configuration stuff) will have been missed, and will have to be recreated. And so on.

It's hard to predict exactly how long that stuff will take, but my first guess would be more than a week.

Granted, that's a far cry short of the timeframe if the factory had been, say, bombed into craterdom. But this may have been cheaper, and in any case it also gives Ukraine a significant amount of information about the factory's operation, which could be valuable in other ways.