If it took settlement terms for them to be "forbidden from falsely representing their business and data security practices to customers", does that mean that it wasn't forbidden before? Since I have never been explicitly forbidden from doing these things, can I do them? Can any of us? Can we falsely represent our business as many times as we want until we are caught or just once?

Germany may get 40 inches of rain annually, but, as indicated in a ZDF story on the Berlin/Brandenburg GigaFactory, the area is in a drought. Also, the site is reportedly above a high point in an aquifer, but I can't find a link to cite on that.

I have seen variations of that list floating around and it lead me to wonder what the daily death counts were like during the Spanish flu.

According to several sources, including this one, in October 1918 an estimated 195,000 people died in the US from the Spanish flu. That works out to an average of over 6000 people per day.

Another related fact is that 1918 was the only year in the 1900s where the US had a net loss in population.

I thought that correlation does not mean causation. There are instances where the use of facial coverings have been correlated with a reduction in spread, but that does not mean it was the use of masks was the reason.

A friend of mine noted that the number of daily cases where he lives has increased since he started wearing a N95 mask. Him wearing a mask now is the cause, right?

I have seen a bunch of references to The Lancet's meta-analysis of ways to reduce spread (including masks and face coverings indicate that that study says that "mask use" significantly reduces the risk of infection, but that isn't what it says. What it says is:

Here is FiveThirtyEight's take on wearing masks.

I have seen a lot of these articles write a little bit about some study, referencing it and usually mischaracterizing what the study said, and spend most of the piece reporting on the speculation of some medical expert and restating facts about historical infectious disease outbreaks that match the pattern of the speculation. But, don't worry, when it turns out that they were wrong (remember how COVID-19 was going to slow down in the summer?), it will be like that speculation didn't exist and they move on the next speculation.

I am not saying don't wear one if you around folks that you don't live with. But I am saying that the science doesn't support claims being made about the effectiveness of masks.

The challenge of trying to fit a well-worded response in 140 characters was one thing that I liked about Twitter.

The people (and, yes, they are real people) that I interactive with on Twitter these days are philosophy profs, Star Trek friends, and musicians (with small enough followings that they respond themselves).

This was probably a reference to a South Korea study that was retracted.

I have seen reference to a study out of University of Edinburgh that masks can result in "intense backwards and downwards leakage jets that may present major hazards", but not the study itself.

Then there is this commentary by a couple professors, experts on respiratory protection.

A guy that I know was working on self-driving cars at BMW in the early 90s. They would fail in amusing ways; all of the testing that they did was at a track, so it could fail in ways that didn't hurt anyone and thus be amusing.

I don't see fear of Oracle's litigious nature a reason to be concerned. Oracle is going after Google's use of Java APIs in Android because, given how far and wide Android is used and Google's deep pockets, the potential payout is huge. Putting ZFS in the Linux repo does not offer the same kind of payout opportunity.

The reason that I see for concern is license incompatibility. CDDL is not compatible with GPL. You can't just take CDDL code and relicense it. If CDDL-licensed code were checked into the Linux repo and relicensed GPL, this would be a plain violation of Oracle's IP rights (as opposed to their claims concerning Java APIs), though it isn't clear to me who here has the pockets deep enough to interest Oracle's lawyers.

Also, the last update to ZFS released under CDDL is pretty old now and lots of fixes have likely been made to the ZFS code since Oracle shutdown OpenSolaris and closed the code. Just something to remember.

No older tech worker that I know is too comfortable with their skills and are falling behind. However, some are too busy doing their jobs to have the opportunity to jump on the latest bandwagon.

The "older tech workers cost more" line is bunk as well. The ones that I know are getting paid less than less experienced workers who have the right buzzwords attached to their resume.

The "hiring managers hire people like themselves" seems like a closer description to what is going on.

The article is behind a paywall. As it turns out, access to this service is also behind a paywall, even to Ancestry subscribers.

For one of my family surnames, Ancestry's existing newspaper search for genealogy info returns results that include common words (not even surnames) with roughly similar spellings, so I don't have confidence in this new service to pay more to access it.

I switched from AT&T to T-Mobile last year. There are places where I once had coverage that I now have no coverage. When the power at the house goes out (a frequent occurrence here) and my phone can't jump on WiFi, I have to walk around the neighborhood to get coverage. But, particular when the phone can jump on WiFi, but other areas around here as well, it works much better than AT&T and I have coverage that I didn't have before.

How is Dish supposed to do that? The equipment cost to fill in the coverage holes in rural areas is gonna be more than Dish can afford or pay for with the number of customers that they would get in those areas.

I am frequently in rural areas with no coverage from any mobile phone providers. In most of the places that I have been where one provider has coverage, it is Verizon. If Verizon can't make filling in the holes work, Dish can't either.

The Audi e-tron went on sale in the US in April, so why is this report saying that it has been on showroom floors for 10 months?

No, it won't because their insurance costs will be high enough to replace driver costs.

Who is proposing changing everything all at once?

VW hasn't yet introduced any MEB (their electric platform) VW-branded cars in the US. One of them that I am interested in isn't targeted to be here until 2022.

The swipe against the Green New Deal and the progressive left suggests that the author is more interested in political cheap shots than arguing a point. The Green New Deal resolution says nothing about time line, let alone propose changing everything at once.