TLDR version: "Good ideas" that are actually good are rare, more often than not they aren't.

Long version:

Now, that's not to say people can't experiment with ideas. We know, from US research, that you can temporarily (2 hours max) put humans into a dormant state and revive them successfully. It's used in some types of operation, when a beating heart is not a viable option.

If you do that, glucose uptake drops significantly in regular cells but not in all types of cancer. If the decrease in the most-active of human cells after hibernation is by a factor of X, then it follows you should be able to locally increase glucose-based chemotherapy around the tumour by a factor of X and guarantee healthy cells remain inside levels they can tolerate.

Since hibernation of this sort involves removing all blood and replacing it with a saline solution, washing the chemotherapy out would obviously be possible before reviving the person.

Would this work? Well, it'll work better than bleach, but a quick sanity check shows that this method is (a) impractically risky, (b) likely problematic, (c) likely to produce disastrous side-effects, and (d) unlikely to be effective. Shutting down the body like this is not safe, which is why it is a last-ditch protocol.

What does this tell us? Simply that "good ideas" on paper by someone who isn't an expert are likely very very bad ideas, even if "common sense" says they should be fine.

Now, there ARE cancer treatments being researched which try similar sorts of tricks to allow ultra-high chemotherapy doses, by actual biologists, and those probably will work because they know what they're doing.

Translation: No matter how good you think an idea "should be", it probably isn't. There will be exceptions to that, but you should always start by assuming there's a flaw and look for it. If the idea is actually any good, it'll survive scrutiny and actually improve under it.

Avpidimg confirmation bias is hard, but if you persist in looking for what is wrong with your idea and then try to fix the issue, you'll either avoid penning yourself in a corner or argument-proof your vision. Either way, you're better off.

I disagree that phones and tablets are both good enough and affordable.

On their own, phones and tablets are not good enough because they run phone operating systems. These trade off flexibility for reliability, in part because people expect a phone to be their primary way of reaching emergency services (1-1-2, 9-1-1, 9-9-9, etc.). Phone operating systems are locked down with strict W^X in such a way that makes them not very capable, for example, for lightweight programming projects. Change my mind.

One can circumvent the lockdown by using the tablet as a remote terminal for running applications elsewhere. This requires adding a mobile data subscription and a virtual private server, or adding a mobile data subscription and a virtual private network (like Tailscale or Hamachi) to connect to your home computer behind an ISP-managed firewall. That adds a recurring fee in the tens of dollars per month or hundreds of dollars per year.

The practical problem with Chromebooks at the time was that for several years, between the debut of Chromebooks in 2011 and widespread support for Crostini (a GNU/Linux virtual machine) in 2019, a Chromebook couldn't do anything other than browse the web without threatening to wipe all your data (because "OS verification is OFF") every time you turned it on. That isn't very conducive to offline use while (say) riding a bus. I had been using my netbook for lightweight hobby programming projects.

Very few businesses that are involved in IT in any way have anything remotely close to decent security.

Basically, they need to reintroduce the US' Internet Czar, who should have meaningful authority and who should impose meaningful IT security standards. That small companies can't afford to hire security staff is irrelevant as they mostly either work in the cloud using SAAS, at which point their provider should be handling all the security. If you want to roll your own, then you should accept the burden of paying for adequate security. Minimum standards apply to just about everything else in life, and I'd rate getting IT security right just a little bit more important than getting cars to not roll over (you can usually survive a roll) or preventing toasters from spontaneously combusting (you can park electrical appliances away from flammable stuff).

You can avoid catastrophes with defective appliances but you can't avoid catastrophes with defective IT systems.

The disadvantage of a bigger laptop is that a bigger laptop is less convenient to use in a cramped space, such as on a bus commute to and from your day job. It's also less convenient to pack in a cramped space, such as your tiny personal locker at your day job. A 10.1" laptop fit in (say) a locker in the back of a Walmart Supercenter, and a 11.6" laptop did not. That's part of why I was so disappointed that manufacturers suddenly discontinued 10.1" laptops at the end of 2012. I remember recommending that people affected by this discontinuation buy a cellular iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard case, a VPS, and an expensive data plan, and use the iPad to remote desktop to the VPS. I rejected that workaround as cost prohibitive at the time.

YES! Many happy users of Proton on Steam Deck will answer in the affirmative for many games. This is what Valve's 30 percent cut of Steam sales pays for.

As if Windows 11 doesn't have its own host of "config issues that require an hour of reading to fix."

One use case for a VPN is allowing incoming connections to a home PC that is behind an ISP's firewall and/or NAT. Such a PC might be running a game server or a low-traffic web server. Another is connecting to the IPv6 Internet from an IPv4-only home ISP such as Frontier.

The <figure> element might help with that.

Good point. An army that sees all others as subhuman and sees only the next death is one that has to keep fighting. It has no choice. It's the only thing it knows. It can keep conquering more territory outwards, or it can slaughter its own government inwards. History shows those are your two options.

Whether or not Russia conquers Ukraine, it will attack other countries - vast numbers of bored, underpaid soldiers would seek entertainment elsewhere if they didn't.

This is what I'm going by:

The report said that in December 2018, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued a special airworthiness information bulletin based on reports from operators of model 737 planes that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged.

The airworthiness concern was not considered an unsafe condition that would warrant an airworthiness directive – a legally enforceable regulation to correct unsafe conditions.

The same switch design is used in Boeing 787-8 aircraft, including Air India’s VT-ANB, which crashed. The report added: “As per the information from Air India, the suggested inspections were not carried out as the SAIB was advisory and not mandatory.”

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fwo...

1. Were the safety guards, which were optional, installed?

2. We know investigators are looking into the computer system, does this mean the computer can also set the switch settings?

If the answers are "no" and "no" respectively, it was likely an accidental bump.

If the answers are "yes" and "no", then one of the pilots lied.

If the answer to the second one is yes, then regardless of the answer to the first, I'd hope the investigation thoroughly checks whether the software can be triggered into doing so through faulty data or the existence of software defects.

I happened to be aware of the existence of a extension made by someone else that offers domain-level opt-in consent to run script in a particular web browser. I cited the extension's title and author and deliberately left out any URL. I thought that would have been adequate to imply lack of conflict of interest. A user has implied to me that it is not. What means of citing a source would have been adequate?

Most User-agent strings that don't contain "bot" nor "Mozilla/" were in Anubis's allowlist last I checked.

Yet. Because Anubis is free software, and because its hash happens to be the same as the proof of work of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, someone could modify Anubis to tie the SHA-256 puzzle to the Bitcoin block that a mining pool is working on.

Until someone writes a browser extension to offload solving the hashcash to WebGPU.

Laptops tend to have an always-on CPU spike monitor: the exhaust fan. So do phones and tablets: they get warm. So do older, less expensive, or small-form-factor desktop computers: they get stuck on the interstitial for up to a minute.

This already exists. Use an extension to make script-in-the-browser opt-in per domain, such as the Firefox extension "Javascript Control" by Erwan Ameil.