At the risk of invoking the Death of the Author trope, I don't agree with him here (and I note that he leaves that open too, by saying he personally doesn't want to and not excluding others from wanting to)..

Markdown is now a way doing shorthand formatted typing, effectively. What it's original purpose was is interesting, but not a limitation ('make', for example, was not made for software development but for compiling books). I'm computer-centric, not mobile-centric. A way of formatting bullets and tables without having to move my hands off the keyboard is great for me.

Be interested to see how it handles the round trip - can I take an existing note and edit it using Markdown for instance. But overall - can't see this as anything but a good thing.

That's not how evolution works.

Yes, life can adapt to higher temperatures, but as the article shows it's not instantaneous as the populations are crashing.

But the problem is the whole point of climate change is the climate won't stop changing. Even if they adapt to the current increase it will take time to do that, and for the populations to recover. But before that happens we'll be looking at another degree and the populations will crash again.

The longer the temperatures keep increasing the more the populations will decline and closer we get to the point of whole ecosystems collapsing.

I always figured a big part of that was expanded use of agricultural pesticides. The thing that gets me with this story is it's inside the nature preserves, so the answer isn't local pesticide use, it's something much larger.

Which does feel weirdly foreboding. I don't think most bugs have a particularly large range. Give them enough local plant life and they should thrive.

And the nature preserves should be pretty free of pesticides, meaning something else, like climate change, is causing the issues.

The only people who have this kind of stuff are collectors/nostalgia people. They want things to be accurate - that's why go to that trouble.

For a long time I had a Commodore 64 set up ready to go in my rooms, connected to a 1541 snail drive and a C2N cassette. I had a Mac/SE 30 an d a Mac Plus. I had an Atari ST. I enjoyed them all, and I can absolutely appreciate wanting this kind of thing.

For myself I've moved on (played the C64 version of Portal? That was developed on hardware I donated) from physically collecting, although you could argue I've merely transferred the habit to synthesizers instead. But I absolutely recognise and understand the enjoyment people get from this, and it's nice to see this kind of thing being done.

Where are you getting this from?

The support for reunification is 12%, not 40%. And there's no more "independent provinces" in China, you think the Taiwanese haven't noticed what happened to Hong Kong?

And China would not see it as "randomly invading a country", it would be retaking a rebel Chinese province. And China has been prepping to retake Taiwan for years, they even built a replica of the neighbourhood around Taiwan's Presidential palace to train their troops.

Heard this so, so many times over the last 35 years. 3GL, 4GL, graphical-style (Powerbuilder etc.), object orientiation...so, so many times.

It's a giant string generator, copying from other people's strings. It's a good giant string generator, but that's what it is - another tool in the box. Most of programming is not just the syntax, it's the ideas. "Doing exactly what you want it to do" - hah, most people absolutely cannot specify exactly what they want a thing to do.

That's kind of my point. If China knew for sure that the US wouldn't intervene they'd invade Taiwan tomorrow. And if China launched a surprise invasion and conquered Taiwan in hours the US wants the option of backing down without a major loss of face.

So strategic ambiguity (plus the US doesn't want to formally ally with what China considers a rebel province) is the policy.

But if China invades Trump might still react, and that might escalate. So his non-backing of Ukraine makes the situation with China very dangerous.

Ukraine was a friendly nation moving closer to the west (and the US in particular). Not a formal ally, but it had formal interactions with NATO.

I don't think Taiwan is much different. They cooperate, but there's no formal obligation for the US to defend them and the official policy is ambiguity.

And this is one of those cases where I think the "simpleminded" analysis is the right one. Even dictators need to justify their actions to their populace, meaning international politics can be very low bandwidth. The rule "no wars of conquest" was a very simple and effective one. In Russia's eyes this got sullied by the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. And more likely by the US invasion of Iraq.

If Bush doesn't go into Iraq, and if he played the NATO expansion into Eastern Europe better, I'm not sure Georgia or Ukraine get invaded.

As to Taiwan, again, simplemindedness wins. How far the US goes to defend Taiwan depends heavily on political expectations. And if Ukraine demonstrates that the US has low resolve for defending a friendly nation then China will be encouraged to act, and that expectation of low resolve makes it harder for the US to sustain a defence of Taiwan.

That's why Biden ignored "strategic ambiguity" and said the US would defend Taiwan in 2022. To discourage the Chinese from deciding to invade during the distraction of Ukraine.

Giving a Nuclear armed nation an open pass to invade neighbours and launch wars of conquest inevitably leads to escalation. And that leads to Nuclear war.

The best way prevent Nuclear war is to arm and support Ukraine until Russia with draws, ideally back to the 2014 borders.

The best way to cause Nuclear war? Cut off Ukraine, let Russia take the whole lot. Then China realizes the US's resolve in particular is weak, so they take the one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to invade Taiwan. And that's your shortest path to Nuclear war.

Did it start and run more than twice in a row? Well then, it's not an Eleanor clone.

I mean - I was there. People were on dial-up. Fast display of the page was the thing people liked. SEO didn't even really exist as a concept at that point, and the whole PageRank thing was later and quickly dropped. At the time it launched and started getting sway, Google's results were different-but-fine. It progressed quickly to better, but by that point people had mostly moved.

People have forgotten and bought into the legend. Google won because it was a white page with a search box. Alta Vista had gone for the 90s portal fad, and people didn't want that.

Later revisions of Google may or may not have been better, but certainly the "gained sway" bit was because it was faster and not laden with stuff you didn't care about.

Now I lay me in my bed,
Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see by infra-red,
How I hate the night.
-- Marvin the Paranoid Android, aka Douglas Adams,

...and we're on unlocked phones. UK, EU...all of it that I'm aware of. No harm done at all.

OK - so let's assume the lowest participation rate is also the lowest number of physical answers - that's not a given, but taking this assumption would actually show things in the most optimistic light. Under this assumption if 5 is 13%, then ~39 (rounding up) is 100%. That survey then was sent to only 39 people - that's quite a specialised survey.

The method of engaging needs to be questioned as well as the statistical fall in responses, I feel. Also the relevancy of the survey - if I'm not interested in the answer, then even if you've found the perfect way to reach me I'm still not going to respond.

Also - anecdote not data, but I've been working in the UK for 35 years now. Never received any engagement from the ONS other than the standard once every four years census.