You're wrong about it not being part of the treatment. Testing is essential to knowing which interventions to take, anywhere from "send you home with antibiotics and Albuterol" to "get this person on supplemental O2 and definitely don't send them home". It's also important for monitoring the patient's progress and determining relapse risk. It is an absolutely necessary, though not sufficient, part of treating a patient.

You're also wrong about it not reducing the amount of illness. Testing is vital for effective contact tracing, and for determining appropriate quarantine procedures for a sick person. Both of these measures are on the critical path to reducing the total illness in the population. Again, it's necessary - though not sufficient - to medium- and large-scale disease control.

Claiming that testing isn't part of treating a disease is like claiming using a computer isn't part of programming. Yes, technically it's possible to write code with pencil-and-paper, but you're both going to be much less effective with a real editor that can detect errors in real time, and you're never going to actually achieve anything if you don't get that code into a digital form. Similarly, blindly treating symptoms is a terrible way to handle a life-threatening illness, and you can't practically control its spread if you don't know who has it.

What do you mean, "it"? The previous prototypes were older designs, some manufactured under worse conditions and certainly tested with less-mature processes. It's not like SpaceX built N identical vehicles and then tested each one until one worked. They built one, tested it until they found the flaws, changed things, and tried again. They repeated that process four times, until they got to the current vehicle, which passed a test none of the others had. So, now they'll do more tests, probably run into further problems (and even if they don't, this one is only intended for a short, single-engine hop), and incorporate what they've learned into the next one.

It's iteration, not just trying the same thing over and over again until it works. This isn't a production model, it's an early prototype that they're still researching and developing. In R&D, if you aren't getting failures, YOU AREN'T TESTING HARD ENOUGH.

I take it you've never created anything significant from the ground up in your life? You sure as hell don't achieve "six sigma statistical reliability" on your first few attempts at something this complicated!

You are a person whom can be served cocktails! (Also any family members, of course.)

Probably doesn't pay very well, cash-wise. There can be non-monetary benefits, though.

Most powershell "cmdlets" (built-in and extension commands) are generic "do thing" with platform-specific implementations. The implementations of the cmdlets often don't even need to be platform-specific, because the platform abstraction is all done at the runtime layer (.NET). For example, if you run Get-Process (or just ps, its default alias), it doesn't matter to the user whether this eventually results in a call to EnumProcesses followed by a bunch of other Win32 APIs to get the process details, or a bunch of file system APIs starting with opendir("/proc"). Powershell is just invoking System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcesses(). The .NET runtime already integrated /proc for you, and also (at least some) stuff in /etc. For example, it uses OpenSSL's certificate store, which is by default under /etc.

Sure, if you're trying to do something low-ish level that has no equivalent on Linux (like access the registry) or trying to do something that is not directly possible through the .NET API (like start an OS update) or is not implemented in .NET Core on Linux (like draw a GUI), then sure, that won't work without some of effort on your part to make the cmdlet / script portable. However, if you want to check how long a process has been running and start it if it isn't, or you want to remove an old cert and install a new one... Powershell can just do that, because .NET knows how.

One fine community member, javipas, posted this earlier:

https://linux.slashdot.org/com...

Larry Tesler extended to computers the existing terms used in manual text composition (cut, paste, etc.) that described physical actions for laying out things like newspapers. You literally cut text out with scissors and pasted it down with glue in pre-production. This is still being done today although it's less and less common.

Extending the well understood cut and paste paradigm into the world of computers as a UX metaphor and paradigm was brilliant and deserves recognition. But surely I'm not the only one who finds it deeply weird that this man's notable and worthy contribution to computer user interface technology should be mischaracterized as "inventing" cut and paste? Talk about dumbing down the news, oy.

I wonder what he himself would have thought about the reporting of his work today - facepalm or laughter?

If you are a regular person who needs a phone to receive phone calls and text/email messages, a $50 phone is fine.

If you also want pocketwatch and camera functions without having to carry extra devices, a $200 phone is fine if you can spare $200.

If you are a tradesman who uses his phone as a flashlight, in-wall inspector, magnifying glass, level, and web parts lookup reference, a pixel3a makes sense if your business is successful.

But if you think you need a $1400 phone, hopefully you either have money to burn (you probably drink Starbucks instead of Maxwell House if you know what I mean) or you want/need other people to think you have money to burn. If not, you are foolishly profligate.

Idiots who buy this aren't going to understand that, they'll think they're getting a SDC kit for their econobox for $1000.
Then the deaths start happening.

So the normal American business cycle?

IQ... will drop furter

You're projecting (or, charitably, just grossly misinformed). You might find it interesting to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

IQs have been steadily rising for as long as we've been testing it (over a century, now), across all types of measured intelligence. The effect has been observed globally and across socioeconomic strata. The strongest improvements have been bringing up the bottom of the range, though the high end improved as well. There's some evidence that the top end has leveled off in developed countries, but the intelligence of the global population is still definitely rising on average.

Idiocracy is fiction, and using it (or any other fiction, really) to predict the future is idiocy.

Your argument why somebody is wrong is based on... a work of fiction, which is premised on an outright falsehood (that typical IQs are decreasing)? Look, I'm not defending the GP's post or sig, but your argument is fucking stupid. Fictional "evidence" isn't evidence at all, even when it's merely extrapolating from reality instead of abandoning it outright.

Natural hand movement based VR controllers like the Oculus Touch have been out for years now. There are definitely games that make extensive use of them, too. Even before them, the head tracking in real space has been used for some interesting effects. VR hasn't been merely "how you view a video game, without changing significantly how you interact with the objects within the game" since... 2015, at least?

The handheld controllers keep getting better, and at some point people will come up with an economical way to track other body parts (I'm always a little surprised we don't already have systems combining current VR gear with stuff like Microsoft's Kinect sensor, which provides full-body tracking albeit at low resolution). Tactile feedback is still quite limited - controller rumble is about it, for now - but you might be surprised how little that matters. Try playing a game like "Robo Recall" - which came out with the Oculus Touch - where you can physically tear your (robotic) enemies apart by hand and throw the pieces at the rest. Sure, you can't physically feel the process of doing this, and occasionally you'll accidentally punch a robot in the face when you only meant to grab it by the head since you can't feel where the edge of it is, but your eyes and ears can do an impressive job of fooling your proprioception, and at that point you genuinely don't even notice that you're gripping a controller and waving it in the air instead of beating down a murderous robot with its own disembodied arm.

You don't, though. You keep a meaningless blob of ciphertext in the cloud. The passwords - either the ones stored in LastPass, or the master password used to derive the key to decrypt them - never leave your client.

Also, you can access your LastPass vault offline, if you've used LastPass on that machine before (and didn't tell it to delete the local copy). The server is just used for synchronization and accessing the vault from a new machine.

LastPass stores your vault locally (unless you tell it not to) after you log in. It synchronizes automatically through the server, but you can use it offline if you need to.

https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/... (scroll down and expand the section "Offline Access to your LastPass Vault")

It's really sad to see such terrible security advice parroted here, on a site nominally used by the tech-savvy, and then modded up. Re-using passwords anywhere, ever, at any level of security? You're being a moron. Even with 2FA on the "really important" ones.

If you can't bring yourself to trust the experts who have done extensive security reviews (and are far more qualified to do them than you, plainly) then may I suggest you please educate yourself on how any half-decent password manager works (hint: both the company and the server that host your password "vault" only ever see the ciphertext and never see the key or even your password; they cannot decrypt or otherwise access your stored passwords). You don't have to use one that automatically syncs across different devices - though it's awfully convenient - but you absolutely should use one. Even the low-tech pen, paper, and locked filing cabinet option is much more secure than what you're doing.

Please stop this blind-leading-the-blind "multiple levels of security" idiocy. It's a terrible idea.

The problem with relying on little-known password managers is that, unless you're both competent to review their security (including cryptography) and have actually sat down to do that, or know and trust somebody for whom both are true, you have very little reason for confidence in it. Being open source doesn't mean a thing if nobody reviews the source; "many eyes" only applies if there are, in fact, many eyes bothering to read it.

LastPass, for all its warts (and they are many), has survived both extensive third-party review and a lot of trial-by-fire. Writing something like that securely is a lot harder than it sounds (much like crypto in general). The server-side portion isn't open sourced anywhere as far as I know, but it doesn't matter, because the client-side portion is (it's javascript; they can't help but reveal the source even if they wanted to) and it's quite possible to verify that the server never even gets enough information to decrypt your vault. With end-to-end protection like that, it doesn't matter where the vault is stored.

it's better to trust one's own servers than someone else's...especially with passwords

The server just holds a bunch of ciphertext. It doesn't have access to the key needed to decrypt it. It doesn't have access to the password from which the key is derived. There's nothing the server can do to get your passwords, no matter how trustworthy (or not) it may be, except try to brute-force guess the password... a goal doomed to failure, given the expensive key derivation function, unless you used an awful master password.