I'm not sure where to lay the blame - the execution team (people making the films) or the production team (people signing off on the vision), but the end result hasn't been very good at all. The one exception seems to be the remake of Casino Royale - which would have been a good movie even without the additional allure of it being a Bond film. That film had soul. Bond, the character, and not the Bond gadgets, are the things that made the difference in the plot of that movie. But all the subsequent Daniel Craig movies had a steady degradation in quality. Even the last one - "No time to die" - even though it was better than its predecessor, didn't come close to the high-watermark established by Casino Royale.

When one compares the creative gimmicks and the stunts of the series, the Mission Impossible series is much better. All in all, I'm just not excited about there being any future Bond films. If the Broccoli family wants to fight it out with Amazon, maybe someone can make an interesting movie out of that conflict. I think the entertainment needs to move on and focus on building new narratives, characters and worlds rather than using old ones as a crutch.

Known VPN services have identifiable server addresses that can be blocked. Instead, you can set up a cheap raspberry pi (or other) at your home and use an encrypted SSH connection to that [raspberry pi] from far away. Then turn on your SOCKS proxy (part of WiFi Details on Macintosh) and check to see that your IP address shows to the world you access as that of your raspberry pi. I do this all the time, including right now. It also helps to watch sports events.

Thanks.

> The more competent military leaders, like Lee... FYI, the podcast ["Behind the Bastards"](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661) is currently doing a 4 part deep dive on "Robert E. Lee: A Lifetime of Failure." I'm only up to the middle of part 3 with him starting the war as commander of Viginian forces (the Confederacy is still being formed) but the general vibe so far is "he is definitely not the genius the Lost Cause makes him out to be, but he's smart enough to pull back Jackson from invading Maryland and provoking the Union because they have no army yet." Worth a listen.

Regarding the apocalyptic mindset, I'd like to propose that if anyone ever makes a public claim of such they are required to read the [Wikipedia list of predicted apocalyptic events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events?wprov=sfla1) and write a 5 page essay about why they're right but all the hundreds of other folks were wrong. I'm sure it wouldn't change a single mind, but it'd generate some hilarious content. Aside: If you have a few minutes, check out the list. It actually comforts me that this is an intrinsic facet of human stupidity and not something new.

It's good that there were no injuries in last night's incident out of Portland. I'm not sure if the timing makes Boeing's request look horrible or hilarious. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...

> Imagine that every time you pay for a beer you let the bartender rifle through your wallet and see everything you're involved with. We all have our kinks and if I like playing "You're a naughty consumer," that's my business.

Can someone post the full article. Its behind a paywall.

One of the problems that I ran into when trying to learn nodejs is that there are no unit test frameworks that support whitebox testing _and_ encapsulation. With Java, the PowerMock library is a powerful friend that allows one to write test cases that change the behavior of private methods which are invoked from the method under test (or even deeper in the call stack). One can do this in Javascript with some test libraries if one does not use classes and private methods (with the '#' syntax). When you use private methods there are no libraries that can support you, and this seems like a gap.

Having thought about this a bit, it seems like the approach the language is taking is that TDD should shape the way you write software, so if you find yourself needing to test in a whitebox fashion and access private methods, you designed your application wrong. Its a good thought, but I don't agree with this philosophy. IMHO, one should still have the freedom to articulate a good design without being shackled by the constraints of a testing framework.

So, while I'm sure the language is making progress with all these new features, I don't feel like investing further in learning it given this shortcoming.

I used to keep very detailed spiral notebooks for work and a lined notebook to plan and track personal stuff via a simplified version of Franklin Planning. I still use the hard copy notebook for planning but personal notes go into Evernote now. Since I'm stuck behind a firewall and some horrible IT policies at my work now I use MS OneNote for my job specific stuff (my only option) and explicitly send copies of generically useful technical stuff I want later ("How to do XYZ in Linux...") to Evernote via the email interface. A silver lining to this is that when I leave this job there will be no question about what are my personal notes and what is my employer's - everything goes through the email filter and I've already confirmed its non-proprietary.

I find OneNote to be like most MS products - a bucket of features that feel half done because once it got launched MS felt it gave a "good enough" alternative to stop bleeding to competition and thus back burnered it. I particularly miss Evernote's tags and the ability to easily clip web items in different formats (caveat: perhaps plug ins exist for Chrome/Firefox but our IT policies don't let us use any plug ins). I also like that you can capture/download all your notes into an XML file in case the company disappears (although I've been bad about doing this on a regular basis). I *don't* like the Android app for it as it is very slow and the clipping options are lame - they seem to think I *always* want to copy the HTML on a web page as opposed to just copying a URL. Those minor issues aside, I like Evernote enough to pay the annual fee for it - big praise form a cheap bastard like myself.

Nuclear weapons and biological agents are examples where your statement becomes grey. The risk of a rogue person wielding those weapons and the damage that could result are serious considerations. National and international policy can shift on that basis - see North Korea. Back here in the US, we've had generals put in place safeguards post-2020 election to counter the rogue-agent-in chief:

From https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/16/power-up-top-us-general-warned-post-election-coup-new-book-details/

So its not quite that simple. The US has launched wars (the second Iraq war) on the basis that weapons of mass destruction were in the hands of a rogue agent. That the premise turned out to be wrong is irrelevant - multiple nations signed onto that war reacting to the premise of someone simply having those weapons. Do you not agree that the resulting deaths and chaos make this a moral issue?

No - minikube is not an alternative. Its a scaled down version of kubernetes and a prereq for it is a container runtime like docker. If you don't want to be dependent on docker, then you need to be thinking along the lines of podman (or its associated tools like buildah, skopeo, crictl etc - depending on your use case) or rkt (rocket).