Bud

This means that if a breach reveals more than one of your passwords, the pattern is easily recognized and you just made ALL your passwords extremely weak. Not a great idea.

Sorry, I was unclear. What I meant was, I was not claiming that Facebook acted on behalf of the Chinese government. So I was conceding that part of the point.

Can we? That seems to very much depend on who is in power and who has benefitted from the shadiness in question.

The claim wasn't that they did so for the Chinese government. But Facebook, for example, did so, for its own purposes. This is just as bad. We can't really have journalism being threatened, regardless of whether it's threatened by China, or supposedly-loyal US companies.

Except that this story reveals the obvious reason this wouldn't work. How do you reliably keep that US "arm" from being co-opted? How do you make sure that the software isn't phoning home to China regardless of what the US arm does?

Oracle and Walmart reportedly at that time brokered a deal to run the US arm of TikTok. Do you trust them? Walmart certainly isn't politically neutral, by any stretch. Meanwhile, Larry Ellison was a leading figure in the effort to subvert the 2020 election. He was on the Nov. 14 election subversion planning call, along with "Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.); Fox News host Sean Hannity; Jay Sekulow, an attorney for President Donald Trump; and James Bopp Jr., an attorney for True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit that has promoted disputed claims of widespread voter fraud." (source: WaPo)

This doesn't seem like a solid plan, to put it rather mildly.

Let's not fool ourselves. US companies have been doing the same thing, and they will continue to.

If they won't follow one set of laws, how will another set of laws reliably solve the problem? They can just disobey those laws, too. Anonymous login credentials can be de-anonymized in all kinds of ways.

I sing Bach professionally, for the last 25 years or so. So I just wanted to echo this recommendation. The All of Bach project is a great way to experience the best of today's Bach performance practice online, for free. It's a great gift to world culture.

Mendelssohn is also responsible for reviving Bach's St. Matthew Passion, which I've performed around 60 times.

Sounds easy, but I think you'll find that in practice, it's not so easy to just toss around murder (or accessory to murder) charges because something annoys you. Even if it annoys you a lot. It's a slippery slope from that to making basically anything a "murder" charge. Not saying you can't pass some sort of law or create some sort of penalty, but murder-related charges aren't going to fly.

Jeez, and I thought my -12.5 prescription was bad!

Worst of all is how the following page inexplicably has a rather dark gray filter applied to it until it's fully visible. Just awful.

To be fair, it was almost required to be unrecognizable. The original novels consist mostly of two people in a room, alone, talking to each other. Not exactly workable for a major TV series.

Except that we have all kinds of other indicators of this phenomenon as well.

This is misleading. Some vaccines do use two fetal cell lines in their development or testing. NOT in their "manufacturing". These cell lines were derived from two elective abortions in the 1960s and 1970s. The same cell lines have been used now for over 50 years for various other medical purposes.

Saying "fetal tissue" and "manufacturing" paints rather a different picture.

Also, to be more specific, when we speak of covid vaccines, we're largely talking about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Those specific vaccines did NOT use fetal cell lines in their manufacturing. So now you've gone from being misleading to being flat out wrong.

I understand the pseudo-religious arguments quite well, actually. To that point:

"The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were found to be ethically uncontroversial by the pro-life policy organization the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Further, the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, a committee within the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, has stated: "neither Pfizer nor Moderna used an abortion-derived cell line in the development or production of the vaccine. However, such a cell line was used to test the efficacy of both vaccines. Thus, while neither vaccine is completely free from any use of abortion-derived cell lines, in these two cases the use is very remote from the initial evil of the abortion...one may receive any of the clinically recommended vaccines in good conscience with the assurance that reception of such vaccines does not involve immoral cooperation in abortion."

https://www.health.nd.gov/sites/www/files/documents/COVID%20...

Please explain how the car in question was found in the first place, at an airport the size of a small city. Flight-tracking data will have been of absolutely zero help in doing that, of course.

This is kind of a huge spoiler of one of the great moments in TV of the last decade. It might be kinder if you deleted it.

Yes. Especially when they put it in quotation marks and pretend that others said it, when they didn't.

I'd prefer that we not all pretend that 2000-year-old religions somehow magically dictated that vaccines were bad. They obviously didn't. These obviously are not legitimate "religious" beliefs. Religion is transparently being used as a cloak for political beliefs fueled by misinformation.

Taking covid-related "religious" beliefs seriously only undercuts societal respect for actual religious belief.

I guess it's fortunate that we have almost three years' worth of data conclusively establishing this fact, then!

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/...

No part of this happened. Also, experts are actually experts, so let's lose the quotation marks.

Please cite instances of "browbeating" from Fauci or other prominent public health figures. Please support this wild story in, well, any way at all.

There are multiple X1 Carbon models. I Googled this and it looks like starting with the 9th-generation model, Lenovo finally got wise and switched from a 16:9 to 16:10. This is an improvement and I'm glad to see it, but I prefer the 14:9 aspect that's common on current Macs.

To repeat: I set up and supported 200 of these. For over two years. Mine were admittedly running Windows, so I'm glad you are having a good Linux experience, but I guess our opinions just differ. In an extreme fashion. To be fair, there were pluses: it's very light, they didn't break a lot unless users were stupid, the screen was good quality even though it has an incredibly terrible aspect ratio and isn't tall enough for real work, and the keyboard is good, like in all ThinkPads. So it's not all bad.

But the heat issues and the terrible fan noise would be disqualifying for me.

I set up and supported 200 X1 Carbons over the past few years.

This is terribly inadequate as a MacBook replacement. It's noticeably slower than any Apple Silicon machine, it has terrible battery life, the screen has the same absurdly-wide aspect ratio common to so many PC laptops, which makes them useless for so much real work, and the heat management is a complete joke. Fan runs, loudly, if you even breathe on the machine.

And of course, the trackpad is vastly inferior to Apple's.

Apple doesn't have any monopolistic positions. None. At all. And they also manifestly have not "driven out" their product people. They're still making genius products.

Indeed, the study seems to conclude that it's not rinsed off completely and residue remains on the "clean" dishes.

Wouldn't metal be far preferable? Especially double-walled metal bottles that can hold liquid at a temperature.

They don't break.

I do have some glass bottles as well for occasional use by guests, but when on the go, the popular metal water bottles seem best.

Not always. Major data security issues can be life-threatening for people who are in a vulnerable position.

Great. Now balance this against a century or so of injustice pointing the other direction, and just honestly consider whether it might be worth it.