andyv

> I would really love to have someone summarize how we "oversaw" Japan and Germany as opposed to Afghanistan.

Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, bad as they were, still had traditions associated with modern civilization. After the war, the infrastructure was devastated, but they had what economists refer to as "human capital"-- experienced engineers, miners, farmers, architects, people in all construction trades, etc. They had the knowledge and the desire to rebuild, and with the Marshall Plan, the money to do it.

The Taliban doesn't want to build/rebuild Afganistan. They want it to remain firmly in the 7th century, albeit with modern weapons. There is certainly human capital in Afganistan, but they face a real uphill battle.

The outrage machine need fuel!

Years ago, I listened to the G. Gordon Liddy radio show. The most hilarious incident was when he had the famous political humorist Mark Russell on his show. Russell was in-studio and said something like, "Hey, you sent me this keyboard". Liddy, totally straight, said that they wanted him to play some pieces (Russell sang and played as part of his act) and since their studio was the size of a broom closet, they had to find one that fit and they sent it to Russell to make sure it was good enough.

Then Russell says something like "You know what my first thought was at getting a piano from G. Gordon Liddy?". "It was, is one of the keys wired to a stick of dynamite?". Liddy roared with laughter.

(You had to see the right cartoons as young person to appreciate this one).

With the check held in escrow, it makes cheating harder.

The contractor knows that the money has been paid by the company and won't be withheld after the job is done.

The company knows that the contractor doesn't have the money until the job is done.

-Selling a business built over decades

"Nice channel lineup you have here, it would be a shame if something happened to it."

You can get a serology test to see if you have covid antibodies. It really defeats the purpose of the double-blind.

Answering my own question, this would be the first two volumes of William Manchester's "The Last Lion", a comprehensive biography of Winston Churchill.

The math doesn't look too good, at least in the US.

There are currently about 100,000 vaccinations a day in the US. Ignoring the vaccines that need two doses, vaccinating 300 million people at that rate will take 3,000 days = 100 months = 8.3 years. At 1 million vaccinations/day, we're still looking at 300 days = 10 months. Logistics is not my thing, but a tenfold increase in vaccations may be a little optimistic. Better than an infinite wait, though.

I got a robocall from my regular pharmacy the other day, telling me that they would be involved in distributing covid vaccines "soon".

So I am definitely going along with the main idea about acting as if everyone I know (or run into on the street) has tested positive.

The great thing is that the next time this happens, a vaccine can be created equally quickly.

I doubt that Elon is done making money.

It would work at night, too.

UEFI is much like MS-DOS. It is capable of loading programs from the FAT filesystem into memory and running them. The entry point, EFIMain() is passed a couple of pointers that point to system tables that can be queried to find the address of various services. These include things like reading or writing from the system console, get the system memory map, reading/writing files or even things like reading and writing from network adapters. It's really pretty elaborate. An EFI program runs in 64-bit long mode, with paging set up as an identity map (logical address X maps to physical address X).

An EFI program can exit and return control to the EFI shell. A kernel, however, makes an EFI call to terminate EFI services. After that, it can only call a tiny set of certain EFI functions, but the kernel is considered to have control of the machine. At that point, it will relocate itself from where EFI loaded it to where it wants to live, initialize new page tables, switch to those table, and proceed with its regular initialization.

The Linux EFI stub is a bunch bytes at the start of the kernel image that make it a legal EFI program.

A good companion book on the subject, "The German War", is about the German 'home front' during WW2. Very readable, one neat anecdote was how security agencies like the Gestapo were increasingly hollowed out as the war dragged on.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/German-War-Nation-Under-1939-1945/dp/...

Not a book, but https://fpga4fun.com. I've looked at a few FPGA books, and have not seen a really good one yet.

About twenty years ago now, the Arizona legislature put a referendum on the ballot that would have adopted switching between standard time and daylight savings time. It lost by about 80% to 20%, the most lopsided result I've ever seen.

Most desert dwellers don't want another hour of daylight in the summer, but one of the small perks of living here that there is no switch.

In the US, "Congress" is both the House of Representatives and the Senate, not just the House.

My suggestion is to only wipe your butt the first two times during the prep. After that, use a shower nozzle (or a bidet) for the other dozen bowel movements...

It seems to me that splitting google up is wishful thinking. If they split google into a dozen small search companies, one of them will eventually become larger than the others through luck or smarts. The bigger reach becomes self-sustaining and kills off the smaller siblings.

Network effects are real. I'm no fan of google, either...

We went with that plan at my HOA for some of our water lines.

They replaced a corroded and failed section of pipe, repressurized the line and POP! went the next section... Two or three times as I recall.

Sorry, I don't know how popular it is with respect to similar solutions.

My favorite is the python-based Urwid library at http://www.urwid.org. It was a little hard for me to wrap my head around it at first, but once you get it, you can write TUI applications without a lot of code. Easy to install, many examples to work from.

> How does the retimer recover the underlying clock if the signal is (say) all zeroes for an extended period of time?

Data is encoded such that all-zeros or all-ones doesn't happen. For Gen3, eight bits are encoded with ten bits, look up "10/8 encoding" for details. For Gen4+, blocks of 128 bits are exclusive-ored with random numbers, plus a pair of bits to keep the number of one bits roughly equal to the number of zero bits. This is "130/128" encoding.

> And why is clock recovery from the data signal necessary in the first place? Can't the clock signal be recovered from the clock signal itself?

Recovering the clock signal from the data avoids the need for an additional clock wire.

FPGA for fun at https://www.fpga4fun.com/

The article didn't really say how the private companies were obtaining the geolocation data. Sure, people can give apps permission for location data, but I think it unlikely that people install apps from political consulting firms. Anyone know who or what is the third party who sells the location data to the political consultants?

Oh, you won't have to be rich to purchase E2EE. I'm sure that Zoom will make it surprisingly affordable.

You really need a voice coach, because you really can't hear yourself sing. Crazy but little known fact-- even professional soloists hire voice coaches. A former coach of mine works over Skype, though I never tried that.

One of Frederick Wiseman's wonderful documentaries is "The Store", which is about Neiman Marcus sometime in the 80's. Currently streaming on Kanopy.

One sequence showed the CEO giving a pep talk to his buyers, whose relationship with their suppliers was always strained at best. He told a joke about a buyer who called his supplier that went something like:

Buyer: "Hello, is Fred Jones there?"

Receptionist: "I'm sorry, Mr. Jones passed away last month"

Buyer: "Oh, sorry to hear that, goodbye."

Ten minutes later:

Buyer: "Hello, is Fred Jones there?"

Receptionist: "I told you, he died last month"

Buyer: "Oh, oh, yes. Goodbye."

Ten minutes later:

Buyer: "Hello, is Fred Jones there?"

Receptionist: "He's dead, why do you keep calling here?"

Buyer: "I just like hearing you say it"

I would say it is a free service because most people take very good care of their cash.

That's why you only drink one!