I think an astronaut is trained to take a advice from a doctor in a normal video or audio call. Having a doctor seeing an patient in 3d would be more useful (and more difficult technically). So its probably more a marketing ploy for MS than of any real use.

What the study actually says is, that 114 less (sero proved) Covid cases (compared to the control group) occurred in 164.000 people in 3 month while mask wearing increased threre by 30%. What it means: Only 1 in 667 Covid cases dies (0.15%). So 970.000 additional people must wear a mask for a month to prevent 1 Covid death. It also says, that there was no improvement for people younger than 50 (which does not seem logical, if the mask are responsible for the improvement).

Big tech is hiding profits in low tax countries. They can easily support higher taxes, because only others have to pay them.

Predicting the past is easy, predicting the future is hard. Think about lottery numbers. You just need a simple table to correctly "predict" every past drawing, but you are completely wrong next week. In machine learning we call this overfitting. You need to understand the underlying physics qualitatively and quantitatively to create a climate model. But there are far too many process which are not understood (like clouds, sun, CO2 in the oceans) and far more important than CO2 levels to make a meaningful model. Systems of differential equations tend to extremely amplify even small errors over time (this is why you can predict tomorrow's weather better that the weather 2 weeks from now, or why you get extremely rich in most economic simulations).

If I loook on my notebook I find Windows Update, Google Update, EA update together with application integrated autoupdaters (Firefox, Thunderbird, Acrobat Reader, Skype) running. I'm sure there a others, I don't even know about.

If Microsoft had implemented auto update as an simple open operating system feature (which could be used by other software vendors), nobody would need a private update service running all time. Your application would just need to register an autoupdate URL during installation and all updates (OS, applications, drivers) could be handled by a single (hopefully secure) update mechanism. If were a standard OS feature, nobody will bother building proprietary updaters and MS could further reduce TCO by providing enterprise wide policy control (so that a company could enable a specific update or not).

Maybe an open source autoupdater is a first step into that direction (although it would require encouraging others to use a common autoupdate).

Where is the problem in doing the conversion (for the legacy features) in the converter, so that the new format is free from this bloat? OK, its harder to write the converter (which has to implement this old behaviors), but its Microsoft who wants to have the backward compatibility. So it only needs to be done once.