Seenso

It's already happened. Ever since the coronavirus hit China, N95 masks have been sold or selling out in the US. I'm sure some were bought by preppers, but many were bought to export to China to help relieve acute shortages in Wuhan.

Also, US medical facilities and government already don't have a sufficient stockpile, so there will be shortages and they're talking about changing usage practices to conserve the supply. 3M, at least, has said they're going to prioritize medical customers, but they're not going to catch up until April, at least.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/shortages-confusion-an...

> You can extend the lives of writable and rewritable optical media by proper storage. The key is to avoid light and heat as much as possible, to keep the dyes stable. I'm not sure about 30 years, but you can probably get 10 out of properly stored optical media.

Though, if you care about longevity, it might be better to use a technology like M-DISC. It uses a different recording technology to "[burn or etch] a permanent hole in the material, rather than changing the color of a dye."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC#Materials_technology

>> It's worth noting that the 1918 flu was unique in that it killed many young, healthy people.

> There were two waves to the Spanish Flu. Wave 1 started like the standard flu - it was mild, hitting mostly the old and ill, and not terribly deadly. Wave 2 is when it mutated, spread like wildfire, and killed 2% of the world population.

That's sounds similar to the 1977 swine flu. It mainly infected people in their 20s or younger, because it was likely a lab escape of a then-extinct 1950s flu strain. Older people were unaffected because they had already acquired immunity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/

I don't think so. Isn't a bastard a child born to an unmarried mother?

In the cuckoo's child case, as far society knows the child has two legitimately married parents.

> To hell with that ugliness, go all-out and look for a torrent of Star Wars Despecialized Editions. As good as you can get the originals, these days.

The true original is the one my parents taped off of TV when I was a kid, commercials and all.

> I have 30 year old CDs that play as good as the first time, as well as older vinyl discs.

Mass produced CDs are produced using a different process than the one consumer CDR writers use, and they are thus a much more stable storage medium. The data-containing layer is literally formed out of metal using a kind of mold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_manufacturing#Ele...

CDRs are written by altering a layer of dye with a laser, and that dye is very vulnerable to chemical breakdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R#Physical_characteristics

> Particularly with reference to "a human drug"

Veterinary drugs are a thing, and it appears the FDA regulates them, too:

https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/resources-you/fda-regu...

> They’re not too expensive, the writers are available, they’ll last, and they could be reverse engineered if discovered in the future.

IIRC, the writers for M-DISCs are special, but the reader can be any DVD or Blu-ray drive.

Honestly, I think the biggest consideration for digital archival media isn't so much the longevity of the media, but the future availability of equipment to read it.

That's one of the biggest benefits of paper, IMHO. Besides being very well-understood material, nearly everyone is born with the necessary reading equipment and the decoding software is very common.

> However, I don't think one good deed should excuse past bad behavior and one should be careful about glorifying someone to the extent that we ignore their misdeeds.

I disagree. What you say is true in a lot of cases [1], but you're devaluing personal growth way too much. This guy's "one good deed" was a drastic and radical break with his misdeed of overpaying himself. He deserves all the glory he can get for that.

[1] For instance: a businessman who spent his life exploiting thousands to make himself rich, who then engages in some half-ass charity at the end of his life.

> They are paying more than they have to for the low skilled workers. Which means that extra money is not going towards hiring better high skilled workers or just more workers in general.

> Everything else being equal, an average business would be outcompeted if they did something like that.

You're operating using an oversimple mental model. For instance: you appear to believe a person will make a fixed contribution in a role, regardless of their wage. That's obviously false when you consider things like the demotivating effects of being underpaid or under-appreciated.

> The Vax 9000 had multichip modules with a very very special interposer for the same reasons.

Pictures, for anyone interested: https://vaxbarn.com/index.php/feat/8-collection/394%20-dec-v...

> Well you should handle the error in the first place.

That's like saying you should just write bug-free code in the first place.

> I expected odd cycles or other misbehavior, but actually things were smooth and round. It was eye opening.

How long did you map them? My understanding is that to see the "odd cycles and misbehavior" you need to make observations over the course of months at the right time of year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_retrograde_motion

> at the same time it removes the need for critical thinking while giving the best and easiest option for a solution in the first square.

It also makes it a little fun so people might actually pay attention.

Not everyone responds best to a concise abstract rule given in a Ben Stein voice.

> Yeah, the psychiatrist seems the easiest to explain since when choosing a medical professional people may ask their friends who they recommend.

IIRC, connections like those were often explainable by addressbook data. Please assumed Facebook didn't have access to that when it actually did (I'm pretty careful about this kind of stuff and found mine had been slurped at some point, for instance). It's not inconceivable that a psychiatrist and patient may have exchanged emails or phone numbers.

> This attitude of "we know what's good for you" is apparent in more and more modern tech products. I find it pretty gross...

It's even grosser than that. The attitude here is really "we did what was good for us, but we think you're dumb enough to be convinced we did it because it was good for you."

Very likely. IIRC, it's working its way into Chromium, and once it's there it will be everywhere.

https://www.chromium.org/developers/dns-over-https

> Firefox DoH is snake oil, plain and simple...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the concern I have about browser-controlled DoH is that it seems like it could make it harder for a tech-savvy user to assert control over their own network. IIRC, most network-level ad-blocking operates at the DNS level. I've also personally blocked telemetry by setting my router's DNS proxy to resolve certain telemetry servers to 0.0.0.0. It's my understanding that DoH would bypass that. Couple that with Google's planned neutering of Chrome's ad-blocking API, and it seems like it will become increasingly hard for end-users to avoid ads.

And the fact that DoH uses HTTP seems like it would make it impractical to block as a protocol.

I think I would have preferred an encrypted DNS protocol that ran on its own port, at least.

> If your whole test is "This gets called, then that, then that", you aren't actually writing a test. You're repeating what the code already says.

Yeah, mocks are just a way to zero out the dependencies so you can focus on the unit you're actually trying to unit test. If all you're doing is zeroing out dependencies, you're not testing much. Every mock you bring in carries and assumption, and those assumptions need to be tested, too.

Cases like that really call for some small scale integration unit tests, where you actually bring in your dependencies and test them all working together.

> So essentially I've had the opposite conclusion. Unit testing to me is a symptom of bad engineering practices. If you rely on it, something is wrong.

I think that's being too extreme and dogmatic. Unit testing and small-scale integration testing (implemented as unit tests) are a way of testing your assumptions and documenting and communicating your assumptions to others. Both are good engineering practices.

You just have to be pragmatic about how you use these practices. Teams definitely get too dogmatic and narrow minded about mock-heavy unit testing, and some people do manage to write code without writing any unit tests, however those are both extremes that are best avoided or of only limited applicability.

The benefit of unit tests is that certain things are more economical to test that way. You literally can test everything though integration tests of varying levels (or manual testing!), but it'll take more effort and run more slowly. If you want to thoroughly test a regex, just test the regex by throwing a dozen strings at it. Don't bootstrap the program and construct valid input requests to test each of those strings (but do do that to test that everything can work together, which includes a subset of those strings).

> All US ambassadorships are political appointment, therefore option 2 is the only answer. These positions are almost always ceremonial. They are there to execute the will of the president.

Not really, a foreign service officer can be appointed by a president to be an ambassador. A recent example from the news is Marie Yovanovitch. In regular times, my impression was that foreign service officers were appointed to the more difficult and critical ambassadorships (e.g. Ambassador to the USSR), and friends of the president were appointed to "easy" ambassadorships (e.g. to a staunch ally with a fashionable capital).

> Is there any other reputable site for a US citizen to buy crypto quickly with a credit card or bank account?

You can buy it here: https://www.axcrypt.net/ and http://www.cryptoexpert.com/.

However there's really no need to buy it anymore, as there are very good open-source implementations, like https://gnupg.org/ and https://www.veracrypt.fr/.

The title is misleading. This doesn't sound like it will do anything to help make crypto safe for those people who need protection from government backdoors and key escrow.

> Did the author mean "US", or "UK?

> This article seems confused. I don't think the author knows what they are writing about.

They meant US, and the authors clearly weren't confused:

> If British Google users have their data kept in Ireland, it would be more difficult for British authorities to recover it in criminal investigations.

> The recent Cloud Act in the United States, however, is expected to make it easier for British authorities to obtain data from U.S. companies. Britain and the United States are also on track to negotiate a broader trade agreement.

> The UK has all the EU laws it had before Brexit. It needs a new law in the UK to remove existing things. UK will not lose protection until the UK decides upon it.

Not quite all of EU law will be retained:

https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Sum...:

> [T]he UK is specifically not retaining:

> * the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union;

> * the legislative instruments known as EU directives themselves (as opposed to the legislation implementing them or rights and obligations under them, which will be retained);

> * the principle of supremacy of EU law (for prospective legislation); and

> * the Francovich principle of state liability (in relation to post exit facts).

>> He'll be on the debate stage tonight as a legitimized candidate -- having not participated in the competitive process at all, and without a single donor (doesn't need 'em), and levering his billions to flood media.

> You know, I strongly disagree with Bloomberg, having lived through his reign of terror in NYC personally. But I just don't see the point in focusing on this kind of attack.

I think there are two issues here:

1) candidate Bloomberg himself, and

2) systemic flaws that are offensive to small-d democratic sensibilities, of which Bloomberg is a representative and symbol.

The point of that kind of attack is to bring focus on the systemic flaws. Also, at this point, many more people are probably attuned to those flaws than they are to the candidate himself (as only New Yorkers have really had to care about him, previously).

> The Democratic party is really not required to have any sort of fair process for deciding their candidate for president. It can be as transparently crooked and disgusting as this...

It can be, but not having a fair process turns off a lot of voters, and makes others angry. Doubly so if that lack of fair process means they'll be forced to choose between two bad options.

> But countless doctors and the UN specialist have witnessed, reported, and endorsed that he has been tortured and I don't know what else you want.

I don't think that's true. They don't say he was tortured, they say he displays the symptoms of psychological torture. From the OP:

On May 31, 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, reported on his May 9, 2019, visit to Assange in Belmarsh, accompanied by two medical experts: “Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma.”

While I don't doubt those are symptoms of torture, they also seem nonspecific. I'm sure spending 7 years on the lam as a fugitive could also lead to "extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma," for instance. I think that's even more likely since the visit by the Special Rapporteur occurred about 1.5 months after Assange's arrest, and there were already reports that he was depressed and in poor health before his arrest.

To be tortured requires a torturer, and to say that Assange was tortured by the UK for his time at the embassy requires bizarre conclusions such as:

1. law enforcement is to support fugitives and assist with their escape rather than trying to arrest them, or that

2. torture is a normal and necessary activity of law enforcement (since chasing a fugitive is torture and law enforcement is supposed to chase fugitives).

Again, both of the above numbered statements are bizzare nonsense, but I think they're implicit in the belief that Assange was tortured by the UK for his stay in the embassy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_and_arrest_of_Julia...: "After Assange's asylum was revoked, the Ambassador of Ecuador to the UK invited the Metropolitan Police into the embassy on 11 April 2019. Following this invitation, Assange was arrested and taken to a central London police station."

> The very real and substantial claims about torture and mostly about his time in prison in the UK - not his time on the asylum

Can you give details of the actual practices of torture alleged here? Scanning this and a few other things, the only details I'm seeing are complaints of how he was treated in the embassy (which IMHO were self-inflicted), and some nonspecific observations that he looks like he's in worse health now that he's actually gone to jail.

> I would still say that his asylum treatment was inhumane and violated his rights.

I can't see how that could be without essentially creating a lawless situation, where law enforcement is bizarrely tasked with supporting fugitives and assisting with their escape.

Honestly, stuff like this just debases the word "torture." Waterboarding is clearly torture. Undergoing prolonged periods of solitary confinement while in detention is arguably torture. However, choosing to avoid needed medical care during an attempt to flee law enforcement is definitely in the "not torture" category. It's self-inflicted harm.

Self-inflicted harm doesn't elicit the same kind of moral outrage that true torture does. These efforts seem to me to be an attempt to exploit that moral outrage in order to benefit a particular person. If successful, the lack of clarity that introduces just creates extra doubt in cases of true torture that blunts the outrage.

Here are some similar cases:

After conducting a bunch of bombings, Eric Rudolph fled the FBI by living in a forest for years, feeding himself by gathering acorns and dumpster diving [1]. His choice to do that to himself is similar to what Assange did, and was not torture, either.

Rudolph's brother, bizarrely, decided to cut off his own hand with a saw to protest the FBI's treatment of his brother and its surveillance of his family [2]. If the FBI had done that to him, it'd have been a gruesome case of torture, but since he did it to himself, it's definitely not torture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph

[2] http://www-cgi.cnn.com/US/9803/09/briefs.pm/rudolph.amputati...

> One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite on these things to report back their position once a day once it has been abandoned. Something like that should be able to run for a couple of years at least.

>> Yep, exactly what I was thinking. Add a small solar panel and it could probably function for a decade.

> I think you're underestimating the harsh nature of the ocean. Few things last for a decade on the ocean without frequent maintenance, high up-front costs, or both - and often not even then.

A solar powered GPS beacon may be an exception to that rule.

Couldn't you just encase the beacon electronics and the solar panel in a hunk of clear epoxy potting [1], and then secure the thing to the deck with stainless steel screws? For an application like this, it's probably sufficient that the beacon only operate during daylight hours, so you probably don't even need a battery.

I don't imagine the electronics would cost much more than that for a PLB [2], so we're talking somewhere in the ballpark of $500. The main expense would be the receiving satellite and sending a helicopter to the ship for installation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics)

[2] https://www.rei.com/c/personal-locator-beacons