Ah, so you're one of those who believes it's fine for leaders to steal, as long as they do a good job otherwise? Kudos for admitting the corruption, at least.

But the jobs and inflation numbers aren't really good. We're gaining jobs, not losing them, but we're gaining them at the slowest rate since the pandemic. Inflation was trending down, but has stabilized and then ticked up the last couple of months. Also, manufacturing is down and manufacturing investment is way down, as is capex investment across all industries, and the tariffs -- which even with the "deals" reducing them are still at the highest level since the 1930s -- haven't really started to bite yet.

Fingers crossed that job creation ticks back up, inflation turns around and starts going back down (or holds steady), and that the business environment stabilizes enough for businesses to begin trying to grow again, but I'm not holding my breath. Randomly jerking the business environment one way and then another is not how you encourage a healthy economy.

Cereal grains were the suspects I had in mind - I didn't know until you mentioned it that legumes are now part of cat food.

Thanks for the insight. It makes me wonder - totally aside from diet-induced dementia - if some of us are doomed to have it just because of age. Maybe it's something which happens in certain species, regardless of diet or whatever equivalent of the APOE4 gene they might have.

And you link directly to the evidence of my correct use.

There is no question of precision in counting humans and thus every 1 human can be represented as 1.000000 humans. When dividing populations to find a proportion, you have use as many decimal places as you see fit.

Kindest regards.

LOL

That's not how math works. You can't have 2 apples shared among 3 people and each person receive 100% of an apple.

My first thought was that the times when you have the most solar irradiance tend to line up pretty closely with when you need the most power for air conditioning, for the most part, but that's only true for the U.S. If you include Canada, where heat pumps have to do more work heating in the winter than cooling in the summer, that's not true.

So yeah, that's maybe plausible, if we end up using that much solar. On the flip side, if we could get past the geopolitical problems, having massive solar farms in South America for the North American winter and vice versa would solve that, too, and a lot more efficiently than what you'd get from using hydrogen even with transmission losses over thousands of miles. (You'd have only about 35% loss for a HVDC line from Canada to Chile.)

For that matter, pumped storage hydro is dramatically more efficient (70% to 85%) than hydrogen. So is pressurized air storage (also 70% to 85%). And both are a LOT simpler from a technology perspective than anything involving hydrogen, which means they are far less likely to fail, and if they do fail, they're likely to be less catastrophic (read "Oh, the humanity").

I just don't see hydrogen as a viable means of storing energy except in very specific niche cases where you absolutely have to carry an insane amount of energy with you and you cannot deal with the weight of batteries for some reason (e.g. aviation, maybe). For anything where you have a fixed ground installation, hydrogen is only worth doing if you would otherwise be wasting some thermal energy and cannot use it for some other more efficient purpose (e.g. the nuclear power plant hydrogen production example, where you could use waste heat for both splitting water and compressing the hydrogen). If you're starting out with electricity, it's really a non-starter, because there are just too many better ways to store that energy with far lower losses already, and there's no evidence after decades of research that it is even possible for hydrogen to ever reach a point where this won't be true. It probably would violate the laws of thermodynamics.

The only reason anybody is doing anything with hydrogen is because of buzz and available research dollars, IMO. It's a terrible way to do pretty much anything unless there are no other options for some reason, and after nearly a hundred years of trying to make this technology viable, IMO, we'd be better off writing it off as a failed experiment and moving on.

It really isn't.

Because those recovery mechanisms have created account access attack vectors.

This is true for YouTube Music and other things where there are contractual limits they have to abide by. But outside of that, there is no limit on the number of devices you can have logged into a Google account.

There are really good account security reasons for this.

No, you can also set up other factors. Configure Google Authenticator (or another TOTP app; they're all the same) or, even better, get a USB or bluetooth security key. You can also generate backup codes and store them in a safe place.

All of this comes down to the simple fact that account hijacking is a huge problem, for Google as well as for users, though mostly for users, and passwords suck.

I know it's more fun to be cynical and assume it's all just BigCorp being nefarious, but it's not true. I know people in the Google account security teams and they're pulling their hair out. What they really want to do is deprecate phone numbers, too, because they're actually not a good authentication factor. But users aren't willing to use TOTP or security keys and while passkeys are great, if you lose your device, you lost your passkey. The least common denominator authenticator that provides some measure of security is the phone number.

No one should be using RSA now, even ignoring QC. RSA is slow, unwieldy and error-prone. No one who knows what they're doing uses it except in very narrow niches where it has properties that EC doesn't. Every cryptographer and cryptographic security engineer I know (including me) treats the use of RSA in protocol designs as analogous to a "code smell", a strong one. If I see a protocol design that uses RSA, it's an immediate red flag that the designer very likely doesn't know what they're doing and has probably made a bunch of mistakes that compromise security. Unless, of course, the design explains in detail why they did the weird and risky thing. Competent people will know it's weird and risky and explain their rationale for using RSA in the first few paragraphs of the doc.

However, the EC-based things people should be using are also at risk to QCs, and everyone making hardware with a lifespan of more than a few years should be moving to PQC algorithms now. At minimum, you should make sure that your cryptography-dependent designs explicitly plan for how you will migrate to PQC (including on devices in the field, if relevant). You don't have to actually move now as long as you have a clear path for moving later. But if you're, say, shipping hardware with embedded firmware verification keys, you should probably make sure that it contains a SPHINCS+ key or something and some way to enable its use in the future, even if only to bootstrap the use of some more manageable PQC algorithm.

That's not correct.

400/8200 = 0.0487804878 or 4.87804878%.

To be fair, I should have rounded up the hundredths part of the percentage instead of truncated. As a result, my math is off by .002%, but yours is off by .123%.

I'll stick with my math.

I see no evidence that it's true. It's almost always the case that competition pushes progress faster. The only real exceptions are when the competitors are able to keep core elements of their approach secret, which isn't the case here; both IBM and Google researchers are regularly publishing most of the details of what they're doing.

This is definitively, objectively, not true, at least with respect to code quality, performance and security. Where Linux shines is in support, both in terms of available device drivers and niche-specific features, and in terms of having the broadest base of experienced users and admins. If you need a kernel and OS that will run on nearly any platform, with nearly any devices, and for which you can easily hire people who already know it, Linux is your best option. It got that way not by being supremely excellent at anything but by being reliably good enough (barely) at almost everything.

But it's really not the best kernel. In fact, if you want to look at widely-used OS kernels, I'd say that both of the other alternatives (Darwin and ntoskrnl) are technically better in important ways, and that both are less buggy. I do security, so from my perspective that's the key measure, and both are definitely better than Linux, as are many of the *BSDs.

Note that I'm not knocking Linus. It's actually rather amazing that Linux works all the places and all the ways that it does, and it's a powerful testament to Linus' ability that he's still running his project, even now that it's critical to world technology stacks, including at the biggest tech companies. Being good enough at everything is hard, and that goal is probably fundamentally incompatible with being extremely high-quality, or maximally-performant in a particular niche, or highly secure, etc.

Why not? You're going to read and review the code just as thoroughly as if you'd written it yourself. The "while in production" phrase ominously sounds like you're taking some unusual risk, but you're not. It's no different than writing new code then taking it through the normal code review and QA processes to put it in production.

I picked apart your weak arguments. But, whatever.

Here is a list of unsolved physics problems unsuited to current mathematical modeling.

"I, at any rate, am convinced that [God] does not throw dice" Albert Einstein
“Not only does God play dice but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.” Stephen Hawking
"And they are loaded." - Me.

From TFA:
The discovery has been hailed as a "perfect natural model for Alzheimer's"
and
"Because cats naturally develop these brain changes, they may also offer a more accurate model of the disease..."

It may be a "natural model", in that cats develop the same disease in a manner similar to that of humans. But I question the "naturally develop these brain changes" assertion.

Given the well-known association of diet and lifestyle with the development of human dementia - and given that most domestic cat food is processed crap which probably mimics the processed crap that humans eat - I'm wondering if feral cats who eat birds, rodents, and the like are significantly less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease.

It's great that we have cats in whom we can study Alzheimer's, with the aim of developing treatments for both felines and humans. But I think we should be looking more closely at possible causes. After all, preventing disease is better than treating it.

Then again, maybe feral cats simply don't live long enough to develop the disease...

Personally, I'd rather we had a perfect model of something that wasn't an animal or a human to experiment on.

We don't.

Is it humane to know there is a cure for something, animal or human, and decide not to seek a cure? To let them suffer with it?

Setting a broken limb causes immense pain. Should we force people and animals to live with unset, unhealed broken bones? Some forms of cancer eat away at the body, also causing unimaginable pain with currently no hope for a cure. Yet many jurisdictions do not recognize the right of the person so suffering to choose to end their life. If it were a pet, most states allow for the owner to be prosecuted for not putting it down.

Who knows, maybe the moon really is green cheese?
Speculation is a wonderful tool but terrible master.

Science doesn't have morals. People do. I don't recall a recent instance where legitimate research caused pain in animals or humans simply to cause pain for no valid research purpose. Even removal of pain can be immoral - case in point is the coverup involving Fentanyl and Oxycontin's addiction properties, and the laws passed to protect the families that owned those drugs and promoted the falsehoods from being sued for their illegal and very immoral actions.

  I've read about many people suffering from what I would deem psychosis (and I'm not a mental health expert) doing so. Kristi Nome is an self admitted example of someone I believe is unbalanced. Others disagree with my assessment. Going back in history and risking a Godwin, Josef Mengele is another. Marquis de Sade, in Justine wrote eloquently on the "art" of torture and depravity.

Like many things, this is another where circumstances and intent differ by each case. There are no simple, always right answers, nor answers "everyone" agrees with. Even my own assessment is no unwavering guiding star. Tomorrow I may change my mind. That's what reasonably sane people do when presented with more information.