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Comment Re: CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score 1) 138

One of the problems Spain has is its limited number of overland high voltage connections.

The only way for Spain to connect is via the Pyrenees to France and France has been actively sabotaging new projects because they don't want to bear the cost of building all the pylons and the other infrastructure needed.

Comment Separate from the rebranding of covid.gov... (Score 5, Insightful) 213

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

Comment Re: He can fork it if he doesn't like it (Score 1) 68

Google has its own fork for Android.

We're talking about a couple of guys on a pet project, not Google. And we're also not talking about something like ZFS which can reasonably be maintained as a separate directory with a couple of changes to mainline here and there and some hooks (which is difficult enough to keep up-to-date).

Their project requires numerous upstream changes which the maintainers are afraid to implement because they'll be stuck with supporting it later on, plus they don't know rust. And if they do fork then a bunch of stuff stops working which defeats the purpose of the project in the first place.

On the other hand, Hector has just proven the point of the maintainers by walking away instead of getting more involved with mainline.

Linux has become too large and too important to fork easily. It's not like forking a run-of-the-mill software project, Linux has thousands of devs.

Comment Re:He can fork it if he doesn't like it (Score 0) 68

If you had read the thread, you would have noticed that the entire problem here is that Linux is inherently unforkable.

There are no "forks". There is just Linus. You can't go on github and click the fork button. All you can do is maintain patches and try and keep them patchable on the current kernel, which requires constant work. And that is why people quit! It's just too much damn work...

Even if you could fork, then you run into issues such as the ones Hector described in hist post: Mesa only accepts patches that work with the mainline kernel, so your patches are useless for anyone using Mesa. And that's just one example.

Comment Re: Project will be canceled (Score 1) 154

Comment Re:One guy resigned 2 days after being hired (Score 1) 47

Back around 2001/2002, I had friends who received $k signing bonuses and then $k severance bonuses, all without leaving school. Such things are corporate round-off error when compared to related overhead expenses. Don't blame the worker who has to find a new job, especially if they relocated.

Comment Re:Seems like a simple standard to me (Score 1) 37

Look at the recent Boeing or Intel articles for examples of what happens when specialist decisions are made by distant accountants / MBAs.

Anonymizing and generalizing some real-world SNAFU medical decisions: Because of history X, doctors know procedure Y is unlikely to work for this patient, even though it is generally effective for other patients with this condition. However insurance requires Y to be tried before Z, because Y is 50% cheaper. Never mind that the weeks long delay caused by mandatory insurance review, plus another month lost trying Y, allows the cancer cells to multiply / spread three or four cycles (doubling each time, for 8x to 16x total)! Or that the expected cost is nearly 1.5 Z because doctors knew X!

Comment Re:What about WhatsApp? (Score 1) 111

BTW, compare this to the time France forced all SSH traffic to use weak encryption in France, so that Linux distros had to create special, weak SSH versions. We ignored that.

Also compare this to the special chip France wanted to force everyone to use (in the 90s or so) that they could decrypt.

These people are fucking Nazis. We need to stop them, and we will. Time for some doxxing so they can see what loss of privacy means.

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