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Comment Separate from the rebranding of covid.gov... (Score 5, Insightful) 213

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

Comment Re:Thank you, taxpayers (Score 1) 108

Permits, Drawings, restoration, meeting the requirements for the right-of-way access and dealing with the glacial deposits of rocks etc, trenching can take over a year to return to the original condition, not accounting for the fact that the soil may not settle back the same way if there's any moisture.

I can tell you that boring is the standard by which you optimize many of these items.

Pole attachment costs can be the same or more than underground/boring if you need to upgrade or replace the poles, and it can take up to 180 days to get all the utilities on a pole to relocate, hence why google wanted one-touch make-ready rules to become the norm. They're not wrong, but the issue also is many people are illegally attached to poles, and in some of these rural areas the poles are actually the ORIGINALS from the REA expansion dating prior to the 1940s.

Comment Re:Why not use amplified WiFi for half a mile? (Score 1) 108

The goals of the county gap project and funding was to provide service to these areas. The problem is the tower may be 2-3 miles away and to hit these speeds, it requires more spectrum than is available, even if you use the RF Elements horn based antennas.

If the farm properties along the way are subdivided they can be connected for much lower cost in the future with this.

Comment Re:Starlink... (Score 5, Interesting) 108

but that fiber run is a much better investment long term, as the max data transmission of the fiber line itself is much higher than the 1gb currently offered, and all that is needed is upgrade it is better fiber transmitters and receivers at each end, as long as the ISP can also handle the increased bandwidth. As the national and global networks improve, so could the existing fiber infrastructure.

There's also this thing known as a "pole denial" - aka no, you can't attach to that pole, which requires then doing something else, either setting your own pole or doing something alternative as a result. Just like mixing technology or environments (eg: Ubuntu vs Debian, or worse a RPM vs DPKG or Windows vs *BSD) having a mix of construction types can make your life more complex. I'm trying to optimize a lot of variables at once.

Comment The Web3 Fraud (Score 4, Insightful) 65

What is .xyz?

Hype.

"So why this hype? Because the cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space. The only âoeutilityâ for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers."

https://www.usenix.org/publica...

Comment Nice job slipping pro-CCP propaganda into the summ (Score 5, Insightful) 156

These abuses are not âoeallegedâ; they are happening, and they are not based on dubious âoeresearchesâ [sic]:

https://www.propublica.org/art...

There is a genocide happening in Xinjiang; one that is erasing an entire culture, language, religion, and history of a people.

https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Comment It does NOT mean it is live and transmissible (Score 5, Informative) 95

From: Dr. Tara C. Smith

I've also seen this misrepresented already. "SARS-CoV-2 RNA was identified on a variety of surfaces in cabins of both symptomatic & asymptomatic infected passengers up to 17 days after cabins were vacated on the DP but before disinfection procedures had been conducted"

Say it with me: *viral RNA doesn't necessarily mean live virus was present.* Now you're going to see "coronavirus can live on surfaces for 17 days!" over and over, but we don't know that based on this study and for those using live virus, it's much shorter.

https://twitter.com/aetiology/...

Comment Much simpler explanation (Score 3, Insightful) 161

When Kwast says things like, "The technology is on the engineering benches today. But most Americans and most members of Congress have not had time to really look deeply at what is going on here. But I've had the benefit of 33 years of studying and becoming friends with these scientists. This technology can be built today with technology that is not developmental to deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour," the only thing he can be talking about that has a connection to reality is something like what SpaceX proposes with Starship:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zq...

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