They should have added atm like physical buttons on the periphery that would give an alternate option in case the touch screen acts up...

There is an issue here. He took 4 tests and 2 were positive , 2 negative. Normal people would stop at 2. If he has covid and the first two tests came negative then He wouldn't be recommended for the PCR test. that means the rapid tests seem to be too inaccurate to actually have utility.

"In idiots. You don't take 4 rapid tests in one day. You take one, maybe two if for some reason your job is critical, and you CONFIRM ANY POSITIVE USING THE GODDAMN ACCURATE PCR TEST rather than whining about contradictory results." The point of rapid tests is they need to be accurate enough to eliminate false negatives. false positives are less harmful. It looks like in this case they were not.

So if you have a phone with a replaceable battery there will be no guarantee that a replacement will be good. It will also inevitably be a chinese knockoff after a few years as the company will not sell the same make of battery for long. so go with an expectation that it won't last more than that . One plus though a chinese company tends to support their phones for slightly longer than usual. I could get a battery replacement for my 2.5 years old oneplus 5T from their authorised service centre.

Microsoft ui is generally better than many opensource UIs. Also having the same UI cross platform is also a plus. I don't see any downside to it and the sysinternal tools are really high quality. If they can maintain the same quality on Linux I for one wold be glad to give it a whirl.

certain cultural practises may help. for example not shaking hands but using namaste, not using toilet paper which is a very bad way to clean a gooey mess ( try wiping nutella with toilet paper as opposed to washing with water) , Using the left hand for defecaion cleansing and the right for eating , touching face mouth etc.
Natural immunity, cheap drugs and antibiotics, abundant healthcare ( more and cheaper doctors that most western countries in fact many western countries have an overabundance of india doctors)

And can even be used for Google account authentication

Admiral Ackbar was not a white male ! I tell you It's a trap !

As no killing is involved ? Also given the Short Story " The Food of the Gods" by Arthur C Clarke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_of_the_Gods_(short_story) ambrosia is cultured "Long Pig"

Maybe Ambrosia would be a great name :)

Even if they are not civil engineers. It is ridiculous that the state would only recognise Civil engineers since there are so many disciplines of engineering. I have a B tech in computer engineering from a reputed University. And It says on my degree that I am an engineer.
That should not change if I pass through Arizona or Oregon in the USA.

I sometimes get this on my macbook pro - so it may not be exclusive to Linux... does anyone else have issues when applications stall and seem to freeze the whole desktop or is it just me ?

If you eat enough calories but you go hungry for a large part of the day you can still lose weight. My personal experience if you skip lunch daily and eat or drink nothing between breakfast and dinner and you start to feel really really hungry between those two meanls you can eat all the breakfast and dinner you like...

A calorie is a calorie. Just cut out whatever you want. And people if its energy rich it is nutrient rich too. Nutrient rich is as much a bad word as energy dense when you are overweight.

Hardware accelerated encryption is a good thing - hardware dependant encryption where decryption can only be done on the system that encrypted the data is not a good thing for vast majority of users. Almost every encryption system allows you to backup your encryption keys and use them to recover data - as a consumer this is a reasonable expectation. Unfortunately Companies somehow have come to believe that the owner no longer has rights to their data - and apple is the worst of the lot here.

Basically Googles automated fraud system suspended his account and threatened to delete everything in case he didn't regularize it within 3 days. the millions of dollars on the line was his account including backups etc. My experience in many cases corporate credit cards are simpler and prefered by the cloud providers since they prefer prepayment to invoicing. And no hyperscale public cloud provider will give you any useful SLA. just look at their published terms and conditions. they don't guarantee anything.

I do hope that at some point the Western civilizations are properly toilet trained and understand that you can't clean your backside with paper. A very good experiment i read about some where. Rub your hands in nutella and try to wipe them off with a paper towel. Can you still smell nutella ? Water is the only solution . Indian civilizations had a very simple method of maintaining hygiene. Eat with your right hand wash your backside with your left hand. Don't mix the two....
Now that we have better soap if we continue to follow this philosophy its much easier to keep things clean.