...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

That achievement that you're referring to was ... distorted.

Not by Foone -- the person who did it -- but by the media reporting on it, and the distortions took on a life of their own.

Foone did not port Doom to a pregnancy test. Instead, he ripped all the guts out of a pregnancy test, put in a replacement screen, and it displayed Doom running on an external computer. Details here.

It's still neat, but not quite what the media has been claiming.

You realize this ban is a Biden Administration effort, which they timed to January 19th in order to try and prevent Trump from having a say, right? Trump is on record as not wanting to ban tiktok, so it will potentially be reversed after the changeover.

Who is the tiktok competitor you believe influenced the Democrats into this action?

Windows 11 has two main requirements that Windows 10 doesn't that will send a lot of computers to the landfill :

1. the TPM requirement
2. the "modern CPU requirement" -- Intel, AMD -- if your CPU isn't on the list, it doesn't work. (Without the hacks, of course.)

All that said, of the many computers I've evaluated for "will they run Windows 11", while it's the TPM requirement that gets the most press, it's the CPU requirement that nixes most of the computers that I've looked at that get nixed -- a lot of older computers do have the needed TPM module, but have an older CPU.

Personally, I wish Microsoft would back off on both requirements, but the CPU requirement is the worse one -- a lot of the computers that no longer qualify are still perfectly usable computers with good performance.

That said, I can understand why the FSF would be more up in arms about the TPM -- they don't like black boxes of any sort.

But there's going to be a *lot* of perfectly good computers thrown in the landfill in about a year ... I'm not a fan.

Copyrights would generally be owned by the person who took the picture of his likeness, not Mangione himself, unless 1) it was a selfie, or 2) Mangione paid somebody to take pictures of him and it was part of the contract that he'd own the copyrights.

That said, Mangione would indeed have rights to his own likeness, especially if his likeness is used for commercial reasons -- copyright law is not the only thing involved here.

Further complicating things, some states have laws against profiting from your own crimes -- "Son of Sam laws", though I don't know if NY has one, and like the article says, they aren't always enforceable, and it's generally not Mangione that is making money from his likeness right now anyways.

Ultimately, it's complicated. But certainly, UHC has no rights to any of this, and they would have no business sending DMCA requests related to pictures of Mangione unless they took the pictures themselves (which seems unlikely.)

I recall hearing a 911 call where they'd called in that one crashed, and then ten others immediately showed up or something like that.

And yet ... nothing else about it? Was it a hoax? Were they mistaken? Did the aliens/government take their craft before we could find it?

Is that the one? Or was it something else?

Because if Venus or a 737 crashed, *it wouldn't be so easy to cover up*.

Semi-annual?

Personally, anything less than daily and I get nervous.

You must've missed the words "bipartisan measure" in the summary...

Well, even Windows puts user files under C:\Users\{username}.

But when you reformat, everything under C: is lost. You could set up things to have the OS in C: and user files in D: so user files can be saved in a reformat, but then you have to worry about the size of each partition and make sure it's appropriate.

That said, when installing apps Windows certainly does put stuff *everywhere*.

All that said, I'm a bit surprised that they care so much about ChromeOS being able to reset without losing data -- I mean, the important stuff is stored by Google as a part of your account anyways. "Safety reset preserves local data and apps, as well as things like bookmarks and saved passwords" -- well, local data tends to mostly be caches, and the rest of what's mentioned is stored in one's Google account.

The big exception I see would be Android apps if they're being used (is this a commonly used feature?), and most of them will have their own cloud storage setups when needed.

Still, the less that needs downloading, the faster the device is back up and working. Bookmarks and passwords would re-download in a second, but apps could take minutes or an hour on a slow connection.

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://mashable.com/article/c...

Lower taxes by $600 million aren't exactly the minor cost of living differences like those which cause people to retire to red states.

Your article isn't about someone who is retired, either. It's about Democratic politicians chasing producers away with their high taxes.

Billionaires didn't typically worry about minor (to them) cost of living differences.

I mentioned social security, Medicare, and federal retirement pay, and you translated that to billionaires?

You really are reading challenged...

But having the unconstitutionally pointed out by law professors a long time ago means it wasn't just an arbitrary decision because Trump was running again.

Also, we all know that there is a 0% chance Trump would've been charged like that in NY if he wasn't a political enemy of the Democrats. No one else has ever been charged for that particular made up supposed crime.

Doesn't it bother you to see people prosecuted for disagreeing with those in power in NY politically? Is that really the kind of tyrannical government you prefer?

The people who paid the most taxes over the course of their lives aren't parasites.

They're literally the exact opposite.