Was ventilator usage tested in double blind studies for COVID-19? How about lockdowns? Or cloth masks? Or those Chinese street fire-trucks that atomize bleach or something. HCQ is a lightening rod in a field of unknowns because Orange Man said something about it. The reality is very little is truly understood about COVID-19.

Are you kidding? This is the SJW's "final solution". Minitruth.

It is said so often it is cliche. On Facebook, you, the people, are the product. Whatever privacy and other protections put into place will be the minimal palatable to keep the product engaged.
Farmers maintain a minimum Quality of Life for animals so that they can be managed. This is generally kept at the commercially minimal level so the animals don't die, and produce the optimal quantity and quality of product.
Facebook is no different.

I actually think it's pretty simple. Consciencesness = software. During the teleportation, the body and mind exist in both places. Ergo, continuity (statefulness) is maintained, and the single consciencesness exists in both places simultaneously. Think VM on a live migration. As long as the two copies are forced into exactly the same state (entangled?) It is really just one linked mind. My opinion is that the thing we call a soul, or self awareness, is something that lives entirely in the software of the mind; it's not a tethered spark of ether in an intangible universe. Understanding that our souls are really just the software of an electrochemical network doesn't deaden the experience of self awareness; accepting an understanding of how the mind works shouldn't make your self awareness any less poignant. I do think, however, that the software is less continuous than we may want to admit. Sleeping may be analagous to a computer low power states, but accepting that the soul is effectively a form of software running on a form of a network also accepts that it is likely there are instances where it can be wiped, altered, rebooted, or replaced. There is a lot of interesting reading that dances around this premise, such as, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat." I think it is likely that if we withstand significant trauma or injury the person that wakes up is potentially an altered iteration. However, studies of injuries and neurological issues suggests that there are many levels of how we are encoded in the brain, some of which persist on a durable, low level. Stretching the computer analogy to it's breaking point, short term memory is kind of "Cache", while mid term memory is "RAM". Long term memory is some kind of storage, while behavior, personality and manner are probably closer to System Code. One wonders if the analogy fits well because we build computers to match the ways we think. If the mind works like this, there is a big upside: it makes the path to uploading of the mind straight forward. All we need is the capability to completely simulate a human brain, and to synchronize the two versions completely. One would experience both sets of inputs simultaneously, and the self would be in both places simultaneously. Gracefully shutdown the meat version (cryopreserve?) and you will have moved the mind/soul. Details of the technical implementation are left as an exercise for the reader.

18 cents sounds high, to me. I bought a decent automatic espresso machine for about $300 5 years ago. I drink, on average, 2 cups of coffee per day from it. I expect it to last another 5 years. That's about 4 cents per cup. I buy organic kona blend beans (not pure kona, but pretty tasty never the less) from Costco, at $14 per 2.5 pounds. At . 3 ounces per cup, that is about 10.7 cents per cup. Add in 1.3 cents for electricity and my RO filtered well water, and you get about 15 cents per cup. It takes about 90 seconds to turn on the machine and generate the first cup. 120 seconds if I have to refill the beans, dump the grounds, and refill the water. Subsequent cups take less time. Id consider my home coffee superior to most everything I might buy out, with the exception of any artisnal coffee place selling a high grade (pure kona or similar) coffee generates by a semi automatic espresso machine, operated by someone who knows how to use it.

Isn't mongoDB supposed to be similar to hadoop? Do the same pitfalls for hadoop apply to mongoDB?

Wow, what a bastard. That sort of thing is exactly the opportunity for the VP to say he was doing intrusion testing and the workforce was well trained. You would think you would have been disciplined or fired for letting him in, not keeping him out!

Do they actually delete the account and black list the user name? So no one else could use it? I got the impression they just delete your data, but if I were to come by and try to take your username I could. What if there was some sensitive info still being sent to your yahoo account?

Strongly disagree. The EcoBoost turbocharged 6 banger in the expedition and f150 is a beautiful engine. Better torque and HP than the V8 it replaced, and very similar in performance to the much touted (and now maligned) 6 cylinder diesels pushed by VW/Mercedes/BMW, but without the expensive maintenance, crappy emissions, and ultra slow acceleration. It is a refined, high output powerplant that is significantly better than the flashy "new technologies" going into other manufactures large vehicles. You would never believe that it is a 2.7 liter engine that can tow 8000+ pounds, while delivering decent MPG. (And that is tested against the ASTM standard!) I rented one once, and thought I was driving a big block V8 until I looked under the hood. It doesn't grab the headlines like a self driving hybrid diesel plug in engine, but is certainly an engineering marvel in its own right.

"now seek new markets abroad as subsidies dry up at home" Yes, that sounds like solar products are now well on the way to being the cheapest form of power generation. Oh wait, we are talking about exclusive solar contracts in the petrostates? Yeah, I'm sure the market has spoken. Much of the world has demonstrated that nuclear power can be safe, cheap, and effective. Nuclear power should be regulated like the airlines; constant oversight, well regarded industry organs, and responsible, established manufactures serving well capitalized operators. We know it can be done, and for less $$ than some of the social moonshots we try (war on drugs, Obamacare, war on poverty (at least the worst elements), heck, climate change subsidies). Establishing a long term framework for national and global power generation, emissions free, with prices "too cheap to meter", would change the future of humanity drastically.

> And I'd like a pony to sprinkle fairy dust on me that I snort up and change gender.

This is probably the strangest place to announce your wish to change genders, but we of slashdot will defend to the death your right to make that decision. Good luck to you, future brother or sister.

Running Gentoo. Full KDE5 desktop.

Never installed PulseAudio or Network Manager. doing great with WPA_GUI and Jack2/Cadence. Bluetooth doesn't depend on either, and my wiimotes/speakers work great with the bluetooth stack.

Jack allows me to take a WebRTC audio stream, pipe it into FL Studio (Under WINE!) for effects, and then pipe that output into Skype/Audacious/Audacity/VLC/ffmpeg/Carla at the same time, to as many different sound outputs as I want (even on different PC's!), in _realtime_. PulseAudio is a toy.

His father (EU Member of Parliament Nils Torvalds) put his son's actions (saying no, while nodding yes) on the record in EU parliament shortly afterwards. His father believes he's been approached.

If you're really concerned about security, you are likely running OpenBSD or a heavily-modified linux kernel by now.

Linus Torvalds was asked during a LinuxWorld keynote two years back if he was told by government agents to put hardware backdoors in linux. he said no, while nodding yes. His father, Nils Torvalds, a member of EU parliament, put it on the record that his son was approached by government agents requesting backdoors.

There is a known issue with the random number generator being _forced_ to do hardware-based (known to be broken on Intel/AMD chipsets) random number generation. under Open/Net/FreeBSD, there's an intermediary (software) random number generator that ensures actual randomness. Linus uncharacteristically led this charge to keep the RDRAND weakened, even resorting to calling others stupid for thinking otherwise. a prominent developer resigned due to it.

There is at least one recent Intel Management Engine talk at last year's Chaos Communication Congress. There was a similar talk the year before about AMD chipsets and their secret undocumented internal firmware. If you enjoy strong encryption, you would be wise to apply the proposed RDRAND patches that Linus rejected.

Now that all the major distributions have adopted systemd, there's now a full RPC backdoor to not only the GPL's linking requirements, but a backdoor to run "Approved" (by whom? we'll get to that) code automatically. Many people have pubatlicly posited that systemd will be the cause of "The Big One" vulnerability that eventually comes out of Linux and ruins its reputation.

Now, for the Ubuntu side: Canonical is incorporated in City of London, which means they are under the jurisdiction of GCHQ. Anyone who has watched/read a talk by Moxie Marlinspike will know that SSL/TLS is easily-spoofable by nation states. They will probably also know how exploitable SSL/TLS is today. All the draconian crap the GCHQ has jurisdiction over can easily be extended to a corporation registered under their governance. If Canonical refuses, they will be forced to, the way Google is forced to comply in the United States under similar framework. End result is that you cannot trust anything beyond your initial install CD, if you can even trust that.

You will likely never look through the custom patches compiled into your binaries, let alone think about Ken Thompson's "Trusting Trust" essay. You will just download your updates, and assume everything is A-OK. You are an end-user, and that's okay. Just don't think Shuttleworth's words are anything but a big fat placebo to keep his stock value afloat.

for the list. I went to kickass.to and paid what I wanted for the books. Even got the $15-tier books.