Corporates do not like competition. The USA (sort of a corporate muscle) wants to keep its monopoly on spying on the world's telecommunication, and the competition (e.g. the Chinese) want a piece of the pie too ... while the customers (citizens) remain defenseless victims of whoever spies on them (I don't care whether it is the USA or the Chinese, I don't want anybody to spy on my communication)

Plain old GPS is not accurate enough for aircraft which want accurate elevation and location data while traveling at high speed. Aircraft use a ground based supplemental signal known as WAAS to correct the natural errors in GPS. Without WAAS enabled GPS is not certified for primary navigation. I suspect that it is the WAAS correction factors that are being spoofed not the satellite signal.

I am old enough to remember when google was still the company that "does no evil". How I yearn for those golden days long gone by...

The US is ranked last among developed nations in terms of health care rankings, including health outcome: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/0...
https://www.commonwealthfund.o...

If you measure innovation as number of patents granted, then the US patent and economic system will almost invariably produce the highest number. If you measure it in terms of groundbreaking innovations (including those with no immediate commercial application or gain), the USA don't fare that well. Furthermore, do not forget that a substantial part of innovation including Nobel prices by USA citizens/residents were obtained by recent immigrants that had their schooling (often publicly funded) in other countries.
If you measure groundbreaking innovation / capita, countries such as Norway (which incidentally ranks #1 in health care) still beat the USA.

Fact is, excess mortality mass not increased anywhere yet with omicron - and especially in South Africa, there has already been enough time for it to rise: https://www.samrc.ac.za/report...
Time will show, but so far no cause for alarm.

Why do they use the term "libertarian" for a dystopian feudalistic system?
This is obviously a system of corporate totalitarianism with a token citizen representation - the defining majority of 6 are the 4 corporate appointees plus the two biggest land owners

Remember the days when we could have blamed this kind of outage on having the site make the front page of Slashdot and the servers buckle under the load? Ah, the good old days

Burner phone costs you, what, $10?

[Citation Needed]

After we turn socialist overnight what then?

The joke is that those who are afraid of "turning socialist" are completely ignorant of what socialism actually is, let alone characteristics of other political/socioeconomic philosophies. In their world of alternative facts, all they know is a cartoon beatbox version of socialism, where no one owns anything and the government takes away everyone's freedom to do whatever you want.

It is not possible to have a rational constructive discussion with folks who don't care about facts and who do not care to learn said facts. "Biden hates America" and "Obama was born in Kenya" are opinions that are neither based in reality nor serious.

"Trump said he was going to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it. He didn't do either" is based upon facts and reality.

Indeed. T-cell mediated immunity might not only be more important than circulating antibody mediated immunity, it also seems that it is much longer lasting AND much more prevalent: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020... (Sekine et al: Robust T cell immunity in convalescent individuals with asymptomatic or mild COVID-19)

I wish this fear mongering sensationalism would stop and people would start a fact based discussion of covid-19.

References?

Some medication trials and ventilation protocols suggest small benefits over others, but so far no breakthrough. None of those have been properly peer reviewed and verified in larger settings. If a family member was unlucky enough to get severe symptoms now as comopared to lets say February, I would not have any higher or lower hopes re outcome.

Bear in mind that the majority of Swedish cases that died where already close to the natural end of their life span - nothing will make much of a difference in those.

I am rostered periodically in the covid section in my ED as senior medical officer. I try and keep up to date with developments - what do you know that I don't? Please share.

Wrong on many accounts.
1) the dynamics of covid are now better understood. It quickly "reaps" the most vulnerable, that is the elderly with few months to a couple of years projected residual life span. In Sweden, the median of the deceased had a residual projected life span of less than. year, the majority of the deceased being nursing home residents.
It means, that at the beginning of the infection you will always observe a very high death toll that seems scary, and then it drops off quickly because the number of vulnerable people has been reaped already.

Have a look at Sweden's covid deaths - even accounting for the delay between infection and death, there is an initial correlation between number of infections and deaths, and then the number of deaths plummets even if the number of infections might continue peaking: https://experience.arcgis.com/...

You cannot reduce the absolute number of deaths by much, you can only delay the deaths, in order to prevent a health system from becoming overwhelmed and thus causing preventable loss of life. At no time had Sweden's health care system been overwhelmed.

I believe Sweden had it mostly right. They could and should have isolated their nursing homes better, which would have more than halved their reported deaths. They openly admit that. But they are unlikely to be worse off in terms of loss of years of life, especially quality years of life, since their policy causes a lot less "collateral damage" - my educated guess is hat in 5 years time there will be consensus that they actually are better off by then unless they get bullied into joining the lemming stampede.

2) Belgium does NOT have a radical honesty policy for covid cases. They simply presume / report any death that could possibly have been associated with covid as covid casualty, even without testing, even without any reported symptoms (eg all nursing home deaths during covid). Their numbers represent a likely "ceiling" of covid casualties, and probably an overestimate - nobody knows so far by how much.

Sweden has one of the most honest approaches, since they automatically match their deaths registry with covid testing registry. They too might overestimate their covid deaths, because they report as covid death anybody who died and had a positive covid test, regardless of symptoms/likely causality - and they test very aggressively.

One of my younger siblings got it at work and infected their immediate family (spouse, kids). Our elderly mom (who suffers from a number of respiratory ailments) missed getting it by one day: she normally wouldve had dinner at their house the day after their symptoms manifested. It wouldve have most certainly killed her.

Having seen what they went through—COVID isnt “just a flu”; whoever says is lying or galactically stupid—I have zero empathy for anyone who isnt taking this seriously, whether through ignorance or willing delusion.

You want to go to CES or any other large gathering? Please proceed.

You want to ignore the threat because Fox “News” says it is overblown, a liberal plot, or a False Flag? Please proceed.

You want to “reopen the economy” because you want to be able to go to the bar for a pint? Please proceed.

I will not gloat if you get it. I will not have any sympathy, either.

What users like me really want, is
- user changeable battery
- dual SIM
- memory card slot
- plenty of internal storage
- waterproofing

Google pixel never offered any of that, hence never of interest