As another poster said: in the UK, 10 days ago 85 people were infected, now it's 4700. There are now 10 infected patients in hospital, the majority of whom had the first two vaccinations, and one of them has died. This indicates: 1) this variant has a phenomenal growth rate (doubling every 2 days). 2) although it is early days, since it normally takes about 10 days from detection to being ill enough to be hospitalised, it indicates that maybe it isn't as mild as people hoped. Or to put it another way, the real take on these numbers is that 1 in 85 are dying, not one in 60 million.

Because the ECHR is not part of the EU. It is a separate entity set up to enforce the Eurpoean Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is still a signatory.

He didn't close the border. US citizens were still allowed to fly in from China.

Also, it was very well publicised that SN8 would do the "skydiving" descent and the last-minute flip. Everyone was expecting this. It would be pretty amazing if SpaceX at the same time tried to hide this info from the FAA and that the FAA didn't then query this. I wonder is this wasn't some more minor technical violation like e.g. the Flight Termination System not ticking all the right boxes.

It crashed because the small header tanks which fuel the landing burn didn't provide enough pressure, causing a hard landing. As a workaround, SN9 has had helium pressuriser added while they work on a longer-term solution. What I don't get with the FAA is that SN8 was mostly expected to crash anyway. In fact it's a bit of a surprise that it got as far as it did. But it didn't go off-range, the range being an area that was completely evacuated. So I'm a bit puzzled why the FAA is having a big issue with all of this.

Despite having 'NHS' attached to its name, the test and trace service is run by a private company who have had billions of pounds of public money thrown at them. Public Health England used to be part of the NHS until they were split off and attached to local councils about 8 years ago. PHE ran the original tracing scheme at the start of the outbreak, but were soon overwhelmed and tracing was aborted. (PHE haven't received billions in extra funding.) Some months later "NHS" Test and Trace was set up as a bunch of massive regional call centres with no involvement from PHE.

NHS T&T has been widely criticised for, amongst other things, having no local knowledge - unlike PHE. Any hard tracing tends to get handed over to PHE by NHS T&T - hence the spreadsheets.

Also, although the Colossus was digital and programmable, by no stretch of the imagination could it be described as a computer. It was a configurable sequencer and comparator, but you couldn't, for example, have configured/programmed it to find the sum of the numbers 1..N or any other trivial problem. It did of course pioneer many of the technologies which would later lead to the first digital computers.

At their current velocities, New Horizons and Voyager 1 would take around 70,000 years to reach the nearest star, had they been heading that way. Also, we currently struggle to receive data from those probes using a 70m receiver dish. To receive data when the probe has reached alpha centauri or similar would need a dish approx 180,000m in diameter, all other things being equal.

The NFA article shows a pathological example. In real life, for most regexes you are likely to encounter, perl's regex engine is exceedingly fast. One of the problems with using a DFA is that it tells you whether it matched but not why it matched. If the regex includes captures, you're out of luck. Also, for 25 years now perl's regexes have supported multi-line regexes with arbitrary whitespace and code comments, so it's very easy to write fully documented patterns

From a Trump campaign memo, when he threatened to cut off remittances, to encourage Mexico to pay: “It’s an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion (in remittances) continues to flow into their country year after year”. That sounds like a a direct payment to me.

Trump is arguing for a 100% wall, and is arguing that it will magically solve 100% of problems. The Dems think this is a waste of money, and that there are more cost effective ways to control the border, which is why they voted for an increase in funding for border security a few days ago. Just not for a wall.

Oh, you mean that core election promise that Mexico would pay for the wall with a one-off payment. Looks like the Dems (and the GOP before Jan) are just holding him to that promise.

Only 6% of the Israeli "wall" is actually a wall. 94% is just lots (really lots!) of barbed wire fencing in multiple layers - with a dead zone between where people crossing can be observed, and with a trench to slow them down long enough to be observed, and smooth sand/gravel so that successful crossing attempts can at least be detected in hindsight. The tall concrete walls you see in the news are only in places where there isn't enough width to have a fence + dead zone, or where there's an issue with snipers - e.g. housing right up close to the border from where people can shoot or be shot at. Back in the US, most illegal migrants from the south arrive legally at border points then overstay. Really, a wall will have next to no effect on the number of illegal migrants entering the US. As for drugs - if drug lords are resourceful enough to build mini-submarines for example, then a wall isn't going to stop them.

The ECHR is not part of the EU infrastructure, and after Brexit the UK will still come under it, unless we separately decide to quit. Brexit removes the UK from the ECJ, which is a separate beastie.

Approx total deaths from various causes In the last 10 years in the UK: 1000000 cardiovascular issues; 1000000 cancer; 25000 car crashes; 500 carbon monoxide poisoning; 200 drowning in the bath; 5 islamic terrorism. Maybe we need a War on Bath Salesmen?