Definitely has to be a thumb in the eye of the Noble Peace Prize committee. It's a huge embarrassment. I'm embarrassed for her. It bought her absolutely nothing.

You'd think after a number of high-profile embarrassments like that ( Suu Kyi, Obama for example), they'd think really hard about the person to whom they award, and the implications. Maybe it's time to just stop giving out the award because it's become meaningless at best and at worse a tool for manipulation by sociopath leaders.

There's a pretty serious deficiency in how pesticides are regulated in the commercial and agricultural realm. Adjuvants and surfactants are very important and common parts of pesticide formulation but have virtually no regulation and no toxicity or health testing. They are completely proprietary and closely guarded secrets. I feel that much of the alleged links between pesticide use and cancer come from these adjuvants and surfactants. And there are many other chemicals that are part of the formulation that could have an adverse affect on human health.

And now that most herbicides have lost patent protection now, the market is full of generics, so the big chemical companies can only differentiate themselves by adding more stuff to their formulation, such as chemicals to help the herbicide get absorbed faster into the plant so rain 30 minutes after application won't wash the chemical off. That sort of thing.

Yes glyphosate is a very slow chemical. At certain times of the year it can take up to two weeks or more to kill weeds. Farmers know this, but your average home owner doesn't, so Monsanto and Bayer introduced other herbicides into the Round-Up brand, sometimes in conjunction with glyphosate, some times without glyphosate.. These include quick-acting contact herbicides such as Diquat. Diquat works in hours. I think it's kind of bonkers they put diquat in a consumer product.

I mixed up some glyphosate for a friend, a lot stronger concentrate than he could get in the store. I buy it in 540g/l concentration, and mix it 1% with water. He sprayed it and then called me a couple of days later saying the weeds weren't dying. I told him it takes a solid week before you start really seeing anything happen, and closer to two weeks before they are really dead.

Occasionally I'll use glyphosate a day before planting as a no-till pre-seed operation. I'll be planting into what appear to be green, growing weeds, but eventually the planted crop starts growing and the weeds start dying.

You're correct of course. Although it's pretty clear the original intent of the amendment was to allow states to have self-defence militias, which were common in the 1800s. The Supreme Court has obviously expanded the original meaning to what it is today over the last 150 years.

It might be that only 20% of the US population thinks it's a frenzy, but America's gun culture is recognized widely across the world, so much so that Jules Vernes wrote a famous novel satirizing it.

Sigh. I mean when they bought McDonnell Douglas. Although some have said tongue-in-cheek that McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing.

Again I never said he did work at Boeing. But Welsh, or more accurately, welshism I guess you could say, has been talked about extensively as the cause of McDonnell Douglas' downfall, and also how it really ruined Boeing when they were bought by McDonnell Douglas.

Nope, I never said that. I was referring to his connection with McDonnell Douglas. Although he himself was never there, his associates from GE were at McDonnell Douglas and drove that company into the ground. When Boeing bought it, they bought all of those Welsh disciples too into high level positions at Boeing, and they began poisoning Boeing also.

The link between Welsh and McDonnell Douglas's destruction has been widely talked about.

Also many of McDonnell Douglas' executives, who oversaw the destruction of the company, came from GE under Welsh.

No he wasn't. But AI is to be believed, his acolytes (Harry Stonecipher for example) were heavily involved with Boeing during and after the merger. And he heavily influenced people at McDonnell Douglas before the merger, which is why they were in such a sorry state.

The gun craze goes back nearly to the beginning. In fact Jules Vernes even wrote a somewhat famous book satirizing the gun craze.

This can all be definitely laid at the feet of Jack Welsh whose philosophy of greed has been a cancer on American businesses for years, long after he died. He infected McDonnell Douglas, and after the cancer killed them, Boeing bought the leftovers, only the the cancer wasn't dead and it infected them too, leading the MAX disaster and the subsequent problems they've been having ever since.

While I can't blame Jack Welsh for the design of the MD11 pylons, his influence later in the company's life prevented them from ever addressing the root (no pun intended) causes of this disaster that go back to the very beginning of MD's tri-engine planes.

Early after the disaster someone on slashdot first suggested that the problem that doomed this aircraft went all the way back to 1978 and had never been addressed. At the time we didn't have the evidence as to what happened, so I and others disagreed with him. However now we know he was right.

Maybe. COVID changed a lot of things with regards to supply and demand. Companies discovered that when demand goes up, if they don't increase supply they can raise prices and continue selling, and make more money than they would if they started ramping up production to meet demand. Record profits even. And it's not like companies can easily enter the RAM market. The barriers to entry are too high. So the normal regulation of a capitalist supply and demand market just don't apply here to the same degree as with commodities. Even with more than one company in the market, the tendency here is clearly towards cartel behavior. While prices did come back down in the past, this time I'm not so sure they will this time. Not unless demand absolutely dried up, which is just not going to happen.

It's not just RAM. It's storage too that's gone crazy. Even spinning rust.

Kind of dumb isn't it. I mean you already have an expensive dongle called a laser cutter. I dealt with that kind of garbage for years with high-end scientific instrumentation. I mean you spend a million dollars on an instrument and then they have the gall to make you use a hardware security dongle to use the instrument.

They really want to make sure they get a cheque from you every few years when they roll out software patches. And they wonder why they have software piracy issues with this sort of treatment.

Maybe there's a crack you can find somewhere. I have no issue whatsoever with a software crack to allow you to use the software you've already purchased.

Nope I chose Python because it has libraries and it's fast to get things done. I like the syntax a lot. The combination of executable pseudocode and the right blend of LISP's finer points (list processing) makes it very expressive and powerful for me. That's why I chose it. The batteries included standard library is a huge advantage too. I briefly worked on a couple of projects (not my own) in flutter/dart and also rust and the need to dip into third party libraries was a bit of a turn off frankly. You can't just download a rust program and expect to compile it without downloading dozens of third party dependencies. There's something about requiring an Internet connection to compile a program that is a bit unsettling.

I shouldn't need to state my qualifications but this is slashdot so I must. I've programmed in a bunch of different languages for 44 years. Probably used C++ the most.

Whether or not you use Linux, the phrase "Linux is fine if you are a tinkerer" is most certainly outdated and should be dropped from common use, as it's not really untrue. At their request I've set up Linux for several very normal users (borderline computer illiterate), and none of them are tinkerers!

As much as Windows sucks, I agree most non-techie users just live with it and have no need or desire to move to macOS let alone Linux. But they could all if they really wanted, which isn't something I would have said 20 years ago. I'm completely ambivalent about encouraging them to change.

Seems like I end up tinkering far more with Windows than Linux to get it working for me. And it's always been that way, and is not getting any better. Lots of annoyances and paper cuts. And initial setup is quite time consuming compared to my Linux installs. A solid hour of downloading the packages I need including many GB of Visual Studio's command-line compiler tools. To say nothing of absolutely asinine things like requiring an internet connection and to be logged into your MS account just to get the system booting, and now the OneDrive virus thing. I think the paper cuts are finally starting to bleed people out with Windows 11. But I have no illusions there's plenty of blood left for MS to bleed out of their users.

As the song says, "every OS sucks" and Windows is certainly not getting any better, nor is macOS. Both are getting worse and less usable in every release. Whereas most linux distros seem to get more usable in every release (disclaimer, I'm not a Gnome user). I'd say we've at least caught up to Windows which is starting to pass us in the opposite direction.