makomk

59 ms·

781.
by makomk 5y ago
No, every bit of cynicism about the media coverage of travel bans seems 100% justified. For context, I'm from the UK where we have a right-wing Brexit-supporting government that's perceived very much as a Trump analogue - except t
782.
by makomk 5y ago
Pretty sure this doesn't make sense at all. If I remember rightly, the way Covid-19 was originally identified was that two or three different private sector labs which don't normally work with this kind of virus at all managed to
783.
by makomk 5y ago
I don't think this is even a remotely plausible scenario. You've got to remember that money is just a convenient way of representing a certain amount of actual, real-world resources, and the big problem with "drop everything
784.
by makomk 5y ago
As I understand it, there's also trace levels of naturally-occurring asbestos pretty much everywhere humans live, so there's also no way to completely avoid exposure.
785.
by makomk 5y ago
Obviously it doesn't. In fact, one common long-running justification for why we should helicopter-drop money to ordinary people rather than businesses and banks is precisely that ordinary people will spend it on goods and services wher
786.
by makomk 5y ago
Actually, this seems to be the dirty secret of pandemic planning - as far as I can tell, there really doesn't seem to be a good way to evaluate how effective specific policies are. Even for established diseases and measures, like closi
787.
by makomk 5y ago
This feels like circular logic. The countries which did better of course did so because they had the best pandemic planning, and we know they had the best pandemic planning because they did better.
788.
by makomk 5y ago
Not only was the UK considered to have some of the best pandemic planning in the world prior to Covid hitting, there was pretty aggressive contact tracing and testing here early on, based as you'd expect on what the UK did to keep SARS
789.
by makomk 5y ago
Yep. Last I heard, the country in Europe with the worst death toll wasn't the UK - it's pretty middle of the pack right now, though a lot of people here seem to believe otherwise. It was the Czech Republic, the big European succes
790.
by makomk 5y ago
The UK gave up the ability to do that when previous governments decided to integrate our economy with Europe and build the Channel Tunnel. Every day, huge numbers of trucks travel directly from Europe to the UK with their drivers carrying a
791.
by makomk 5y ago
Eventually, nothingness, no matter what we do - the increase in entropy cannot be stopped. That's an incredibly powerful thing though - if you can redirect the increase in entropy so that it happens in a direction that causes useful or
792.
by makomk 5y ago
On the 14th of June 2017, a gunman radicalized by Facebook shot a member of Congress, Steve Scalise, after asking about his political affiliation. This actual shooting which actually left Scalise in hospital fighting for his life with serio
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by makomk 5y ago
The problem that the US has supporting mass manufacturing and assembly is that companies like Apple stopped making things there, and once that happened all the expertise and supply chains to support that manufacturing was lost, meaning that
794.
by makomk 5y ago
Yup. For context, YouTube/Google pulled off an utterly scummy one-two punch where they initially upped the minimum requirements to monetize videos with ads and removed that ability from anyone who didn't meet the new requirements,
795.
by makomk 5y ago
If I remember rightly, the US does routinely vaccinate everyone against HPV as teenagers regardless of gender - it's the UK that historically only vaccinated girls. (Though this changed very recently, it obviously still leaves a bunch
796.
by makomk 5y ago
One of the standard anti-capitalist arguments for redistributing wealth is that the super-wealthy do not, in fact, use their wealth to have others at their beck and call to an extent even remotely proportional to how much better off they ar
797.
by makomk 5y ago
It remains somewhat, ah, interesting that the biggest GDPR fine is for not being able to withstand a targeted attack by a motivated attacker. The British Airways compromise seems to have involved someone getting access to their systems (whi
798.
by makomk 5y ago
It can actually be avoided on X11 if you're willing to make the screensaver an integral part of the desktop environment. The way KDE has done it since the KDE 4 era at least is by doing the actual screen locking in ksmserver and having
799.
by makomk 5y ago
The problem with SDL's Wayland backend is that, as I understand it, you won't get any window decorations on common Wayland compositors like the Gnome one because Gnome expects every app to implement the window decorations itself (
800.
by makomk 5y ago
It's amazing how little even journalists care about fake news if it supports the right narrative. For example, there was a story which made the rounds here in the UK about expats who'd voted for Brexit being deported which ticked
801.
by makomk 5y ago
Well, at least one major adult cam site banned streaming games a few years back due to copyright concerns. Not sure about other sites but I suspect they'd end up having to do the same thing if it caught on there; the plausible deniabil
802.
by makomk 5y ago
He wasn't just asking for access to the DNS account - which it seems like, in fact, he already had and used to try and lock Andrew Lee and others involved in Freenode out - but for ownership of the domains to be transferred to him pers
803.
by makomk 5y ago
The fact that cops are trained is precisely why they shoot people who try and charge them or others with knives. The correct first-line strategy for dealing with a knife attack is not allowing the attacker to close enough distance with you
804.
by makomk 5y ago
Even on PC, where there's plenty of store competition, the only way to get much lower than 30% seems to be to seriously cut corners - Epic's own store famously lacks standard features like a shopping card, and people have had prob
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by makomk 5y ago
Hang on. If I'm following all this correctly, at that point the current head of staff had only held that role for less than a month. So the big demand here was that control over the domain name was transferred not to the community, or
806.
by makomk 5y ago
Presumably law enforcement did want to detain this man, given that they actually ended up locating him themselves and detaining him, and the article is just carefully glossing over this aspect to push a narrative about dangerous big tech co
807.
by makomk 5y ago
Yes and no? As I understand it, they weren't supposed to be involved in the day to day operation of the network in general, but back in 2016 Private Internet Access' logo (then Andrew Lee's current company) was added to the
808.
by makomk 5y ago
That commit is replacing the logo and link of the previous sponsor Private Internet Access with one for Shells instead, and looking at the Wayback Machine that previous logo and link has been there since about April 2016[1] in the same loca
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by makomk 5y ago
Ah, figured it out: it's at the top-right on https://web.archive.org/web/20210228045521/https://freenode.... covered by the Wayback Machine's own toolbar. This is the same location and the same
810.
by makomk 5y ago
Hmmm. I wonder if this is what happened to Bluetooth LE Audio and if so who the laggard is...

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