If your functional requirements don't include:

4. The toy should not arbitrarily cause injury or death to the user;

...guess where the stupid starts.

At first I read the headline as "Year-Over-Year Sammich Sales Jumped By 61% In the US Last Year ". Too close to dinner time, I guess.

Photos use to be considered "strong evidence", then Photoshop etc. came along to make doctoring cheap and common, and people stopped trusting photos. The same will happen to audio and video once they see enough fudged examples.

Is that really true, though? Yes, Photoshop has made photo doctoring easy, but the digital age makes it easy enough to detect and debunk. AFAIK, it is extremely difficult to doctor a photo well enough that simple forensic analysis can not determine that it was manipulated, and even without that, if someone can show the original undoctored image, the fake is easily debunked.

And really, how often is this an issue? The last time I can recall a doctored photo even being noted in the news is a year or so ago when someone posted a doctored photo of Whoopi Goldberg wearing a t-shirt depicting Trump blowing his brains out (caption: Make America Great Again). It was quickly debunked, just by providing the original photo. I can't even recall any other recent example of a doctored image being a newsworthy item. If that's as significant a case as we've seen, is it really a huge problem?

From that perspective, the hue and cry over "deepfake" video seems way overblown to me.

The definition used in this study is "mindfulness is the self-reported score on the Frieburg Mindfulness Inventory". That's exactly what it is, and how it's objectively measured (by asking people to self-report it). Yes that is an objective measure even though it's an objective report of a self-reported subjective thing, just like "QRDeNameland likes vanilla ice-cream" is an objective report of your self-reported subjective preference.

The only thing the FMI measures is response to the FMI, answers to 14 vague question which as you concede are arbitrarily subjective. Whether it actually has any relation to 'mindfulness' or any other thing you want to use it as a proxy for is anyone's guess. Sure, they may be some MRI similarities that correlate to how one answers the questionnaires, but who's to say what it means, if anything at all. And I've yet to see anything that shows that any of this is well-tested or replicated. Can such a 'measurement' really be considered objective? I don't think so, even if you disagree. The history of science is littered with so-called 'objective' measures that turned out horribly flawed (total serum cholesterol as an indicator of heart disease risk, for just one example).

And while this particular study may not be touting solutions, I can assure you that many if not most doctors and mental health professionals are pushing mindfulness as essentially settled science. It isn't even close. The leaps of faith required to press such flimsy evidence into clinical practice is indeed magical thinking, whether you consider the FMI 'objective' or not.

Ah, yes...the delicate science of Tautology.

Mindfulness is the new religion of modern medicine. What exactly is it? No one can clearly explain. How is it achieved? Well, opinions differ. How can it be objectively measured? Yeah, that's what I thought.

But yet we have oh so many "studies" showing mindfulness purported to effective, of course always for conditions like pain or depression/anxiety that they lack good and/or safe treatment for. But substitute "mindfulness" with "prayer" (which itself could be seen as a form of mindfulness), would the study be taken seriously by the medical community? Yet I fail to see any significant difference between the two.

And hey, if it works for you, great! However, it's insulting when a practitioner of supposedly science-based medicine starts touting ill-defined magical solutions as if they were science.

Living does not require you to inhale smoke of any kind.

You were obviously not living on the west coast of N. America over the past week.

It's not plastic...it's people!!

The densities are incredibly high, there is no doubt about that. A manufacturing process is all that remains to accomplish the claims.

Well, if you read the article (yeah, yeah, I know), there's this:

"Unfortunately, writing speeds still leave something to be desired. According to the accompanying paper, writing each 8-bit ASCII code took between 10 and 120 seconds, which isn't exactly practical for today's consumer products."

Not saying they can't overcome that eventually, but that would need to be solved long before the manufacturing process.

I don't know, maybe you can turn that option off in Windows. I haven't used Windows since 7, and I know I could back then. Has MS removed that from Win 10?

No, you can't turn the option off, though you do can set a time window of something like 8-12 hours per day where it won't do the upgrade/auto-reboot.

The best workaround I've found so far is, if you are always using a Wi-Fi connection, is to set the connection to Metered Connection, and Windows won't download the updates. When you want to do updates, turn off Metered Connection, download the updates, let them install and reboot, then set the connection back to Metered. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, but it puts the power of when updates happen back into your hands.

The thing that pisses me off the most about it is that all I really ask for is that it not reboot until I can make sure everything that was running is safely shut down. I run a few different OSes in VirtualBox that are usually running at all times, and have had a few borked because VirtualBox does not shut the VMs down cleanly during the auto-reboot.

Or VirtualBox VM sessions. This is the one that pisses me off most.

My rules for ejecting detachable drives are basically this:

Rule 0: Always have a backup of any files you care about on a separate physical media.

Rule 1: If it spins, always safely eject it.

Rule 2: If it's solid state, feel free to just yank it out. Worst case scenario, you bork the filesystem and reformat, and you still have the files because of Rule 0.

The only times I've ever had any problem with yanking out a thumb drive/SD card are the few occasions I accidentally pulled it out while it was writing, or when I've had a dodgy drive spontaneously go offline due to a bad connection/firmware issue/whatever.

I'm sure there are other edge case exceptions where you would always want to safely eject a thumb drive; some people mentioned using encryption, but for general use, if you already have good backup practices, the risk is pretty much negligible.

When I visited the Van Gogh museum over 25 years ago, I saw that one and liked it so much I bought a print of it in the gift shop, and I still keep it hanging in my home.

I thought the same thing, but I googled the historical price of gold and it was far cheaper before 2004 when CRTs still still common (roughly between $250-400 per oz from the late 80s to around 2004). Still, it would raise the question of why you haven't seen people offering money for old CRTs since gold has been in the $1000+ per oz range, which has been at least 8 years. Nor do I really understand why it would be so hard to recycle. I have a friend who works as a dental ceramist, and they periodically send off the dust collected from the grinders, old dental work they accumulate, and even the dust in their carpets to assaying labs where separate all the various metals from each other and the ceramics and other detritus, and they pay a pretty good return for the value of the precious metals extracted. If they can do *that* profitably, it seems inconceivable to me that they couldn't do the same for discarded electronics, especially if there is anything like 5.6 grams of gold in a typical CRT. I'd be interested if anyone could shed some light on that.

This is how bad the article is: it first says the recording was sent to a random person in Seattle, THEN it says it was someone on their contact list. Random, not random. Same sentence.

Yeah, that bugged me, too. At best it might be 'a random person on their contact list, who lives in Seattle'. And to be really pedantic, the better term is almost certainly 'arbitrary'.