The fact that this approach is catalytic rather than requiring a binding agent seems positive in terms of longevity and not being directly depleted by repeat exposure; but I'd be curious how durable the material is under real-world conditions(clothing that gets hard wear tends to get hard washes) and also how specific it is. 'Organophosphate' means something moderately specific in the context of chemical warfare; but a lot of fairly prosaic compounds are, technically, 'organophosphates'(like DNA and RNA when held together by phosphodiester bonds); and this would be considerably less helpful in practice if it is busy chewing up the genomes of random soil bacteria; and markedly less helpful in practice if there's a "do not perturb the nanites in your clothing if you want them to not migrate into your cells and start mitigating the harmful effects of your DNA" user notice on the treated article.

This doesn't seem like a lie, a NIC is in a pretty good position to knock something off the network if it feels like it and the 'bluefield' devices have enough punch onboard to run some rules regarding whether or not to do that; but it seems like a wild exaggeration of how helpful it actually is.

If you actually have a set of rules that detect your bot being wicked it will presumably save you some CPU time to run them on the NIC rather than having the host CPU watching the traffic; but the hard part is the set of rules that detect your bot being wicked.

This is basically the equivalent of adding a firewall and claiming that you've solved network security. Yeah, the firewall is pretty well placed to block malicious traffic; defining 'malicious traffic' is left as an exercise for the reader.

Support for Office 2016 and 2019 ends October 14th of this year; I assume that the feature is dropping now; rather than either 20 years ago as part of ECMA-376 and eventually in a live product for either Office 2010 or 2013, or never if they didn't want to do that, in order to draw a hard line under the utility of those?

It otherwise seems like a kind of weird time to do it. In principle what a 'cell' is has never really had an obvious mandatory scale: it has essentially always been relevant that a 'cell' existed in relation to other cells, so that something like an array could be a row; but it has also long been allowed and encouraged to do things like substring operations that acknowledge that cell contents are 'larger' objects that contain smaller ones; and are not automatically spilled out for that reason alone. Not clear that the pragmatic use case for spreadsheets would ever have supported some sort of 'any data type that implies it can be decomposed into elements shall be' rule, strings getting broken up into substrings and so on; but it's also not clear that the pragmatic use case is going to be much clarified by a single cell being n levels deep of lists and arrays of lists and arrays being a fully supported thing rather than something you hack on by shoving JSON into text cells or whatever.

It definitely seems like asking for confusion when some, but only some, "excel spreadsheets" have cells that are arrays, potentially of arrays, while others have rows of cells with contents that, at least formally, are not acknowledged as arrays.

"Guys, guys, guys calm down. Stalin has assured us that it's only a one time temporary abrogation of our freedoms and he has no plans to ever do anything else. He wouldn't lie? Right?"

The water is already bubbling around the frog.

That's the sort of curious thing about this announcement: at least in theory(I assume things are uglier in practice) the X1 parts that they shipped for windows-on-ARM/Copilot PCs already use UEFI/ACPI in line with what MS wants for booting Windows.

That obviously doesn't mean that there's a working GPU driver; or that naive power management doesn't cause the system to run at 90% of maximum power and hammer the battery flat; but the theory was that the last gen was already doing the "big kid ARM that has embraced PC standards" thing; very similar to the 'standards base' that ARM encourages ARM server part vendors to use.

I'm always a little curious what the thinking/strategy is with the Chinese outfits. I don't necessarily expect much from the OrangePi guys; they ship a surprising number of different SoCs, including multiple architectures and multiple vendors, for their size, so are likely to be mostly at the mercy of the SoC vendors; but is the situation for someone like Allwinner such that people who want linux to work on their stuff could be a resource for them and they are just not taking advantage of that very well; or are they actively annoyed by GPL-related claims and really just want to shove minimum-viable android out the door as cheaply as possible to win cheap tablet tenders and really do not want to hear from SBC hobbyists.

SOP at Qualcomm. It has been literal years of hammering on them by Google and basically every Android handset OEM to even keep parts that ship with android support in support for more than a few years(I think the current timeline, at least for 'snapdragon 8 elite' flagship parts, is a princely 8 years from release; and that is with the 'project treble' stuff that attempts to reduce the number of changes that might potentially need to be supported). Especially with the, um, raging success, of Copilot+ AI PCs they are probably ready to pretend that X1 never happened and call it good. I'm not even sure how long the windows support on X1 is expected to last.

"I'll america you in your americaing america!" – Smurf Intelligence

The New York Times won one for genocide denial during the holodomor. It's not something to be proud of.

That's a pretty shallow(thought admittedly depressingly popular) analysis of the situation.

Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).

What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.

It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.

How about avoiding those impacts in the first place? Or would that be un-American?

In other news, scientists are looking into geoengineering to cool our planet, so we can continue to drill-baby-drill until kingdom come.

The directional explanation reminds me of the backreaction conjecture. The basic idea is due to the inhomogeneity of the real universe: as the gravity within each concentration of matter (such as a group of galaxies) pulls it into a tighter clump, the distance between such clumps appears to increase.

I've only come across this idea because of Syksy Räsänen, who is famous in Finland for his goth looks and pro-Palestine activities. So the theory doesn't seem to be widely known.

I haven't seen any serious attempts at reducing emissions, quite the contrary. Sure, renewable electricity generation is a growing industry, but it's only a small part of the total energy budget that's growing fast. With a nation whose official motto is "drill baby drill" and an AI slop industry powered by gas turbines, it's hard to believe the story of renewables saving the world.

Instead of asking how we can power our cars with more climate-friendly sources, we should be questioning the need to drive around so much at all. If it weren't for the petrol industry, we'd probably spend our time more creatively than sitting around in traffic jams. In the early days, the automobile was a more efficient alternative to horse power, but then we ran into Jevons paradox. We're now seeing the same paradox in action with AI data centers; the computers that were supposed to save time and energy are now wasting it.

I'm OK with some form of climate engineering to cool the planet, but only if we're also serious about reducing emissions. Climate engineering shouldn't be an excuse that lets us continue drilling and burning our planet into ashes.

Pity the poor Europeans, crying out without the bot slop occupying the top half of the results. I wonder what Google is going to do to ensure that the 'degraded' results aren't universally preferred to the alternative?

I find the realtime effects in Audacity 3 pretty handy, though they're a rather limited selection. For example, I use a separate Nyquist plugin for nicer compression, which means it's not realtime. I try not to rely too much on a single piece of software, as they seem to come and go, and maintaining old versions on up-to-date distributions is not fun.

Real Men (TM) use Ecasound for multitrack processing on the command line, like I did back in the 00s.