cheese_van

Is the US really "bracing" for this event? Girding their loins to brace in anticipation of this event? Bracing their bodies or their minds? Will the Walmart people make runs on toilet paper? If I want to properly brace, what do the experts say?

Brace, brace, brace. Brace for bugs.

For me, I choose a field that I was not particularly well-educated about, and dove in - medieval history. It's a fascinating and deep topic, and I began to collect a library of the significant histories. Went off the deep end and collected more books than I read. But the reading was fascinating, as was trying to determine who the best historians were, finding their books, and reading them for comprehension.

In short, collecting.

I suppose any type of immersion in a collectible thing might do the trick, but for me, it was both collecting the books and reading them that took my mind off burn out (and a troubled personal life).

Deep in the granite mountain where the internet Kill Switch is located, there is also the US national Internet Reset switch.

What exactly, in this fictional universe, is the restoration flow if it is pressed?

How do you mean protest? Do you mean people in the streets? No, that didn't happen.

Do you mean inter-governmental protest in the form of summoning an ambassador and dressing them down? In the form of sternly worded demarches asking for clarification? In diplomatic discussions that frankly announced our relationship was injured? Yes that very much happened. A relationship was impaired and Germany was quite diplomatically clear about it.

Diplomatic protest does not need to be public to be effective.

With WI-fi and all connection turned off (except simple texting with no images), and with all apps deleted that can be deleted, I have 80% remaining after a couple of weeks or more.

I suppose its somewhat of a privilege to use a modern phone only as a phone, but there's a certain smug peace of mind to be had - as well as security.

I'm also tempted to politely ask you to get off my lawn in the off-chance you are wondering about my demographic.

"As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library."

When consumers are dissuaded from purchasing content, when a purchase is not a purchase, arguments against piracy are almost insulting.

I cost my company about 5 times my yearly salary once, long ago. I sampled an enormous amount of seismic data at 2ms instead of the proper 4ms. This was back when we rented IBM our mainframes for a pretty penny. The job ran for the entire weekend and Monday morning I was summoned by management, informed of my error, and asked, "You won't ever do that again will you?" and sent back to work.

Knowing that you are allowed to fail, but are very much expected/required to learn from your failure, makes for rather a good employee, in my experience.

>The US does not require you to be an accredited diplomat to get immunity - members of technical and administrative staff can also get it.

Having had diplomatic "immunity" as a technical staff member, there are nuances.

Technical staff do not enjoy "full" immunity, but only immunity for acts committed as part of their official duties - this is called "functional immunity". That status does not protect "functionaries" against civil liabilities for activities outside specific duties.

In contrast, members of the diplomatic staff who deal directly with host country officials such as ambassadors or registered diplomats (political officer, econ officer etc) enjoy full immunity and that immunity devolves to their dependents.

Former State here. In a hurry so I only browsed a few of the declassified cables. My first blush take is that the "AI" is sorting and examining cables classified at or below the "Confidential" level limiting the danger of exposure - most "confidential" documents present very limited exposure danger.

Additionally, by State regs, all cables older than 25 years are already considered declassified automatically, and the examples presented (the random ones I saw) all fall under that category. By extension, I'm assuming that the AI is only targeting this lower classification, scanning and applying certain rules, with a resultant output that may be reviewed by a human with much less rigor making their job a bit easier.

I'm quite confident that under no circumstances is any cable at the "Secret" level, even if 25 years old, released without very rigorous examination. This would require NSA agreement, which in context, would be quite the hill to climb.

So to a degree, the press release is a bit self-serving ("we're keeping up with the times") and I'm not entirely sure that the process is much beyond keyword searching of lower classified cables that themselves already presented very limited exposure danger.

Thank you for mentioning the "bat and ball" problem. Having neither a math nor CS background, I hadn't heard of it - and got it wrong. And reflecting on why I got it wrong I gained a little understanding of my own flawed mind. Why did I focus on a single variable and not a relationship? It set my mind wandering and was a nice morsel to digest with my breakfast. Thanks!

Eisenhower noted in his account, Crusade in Europe, that (paraphrasing from memory) that "Few really understand the relationship between America's safety and prosperity and events far away in Europe."

Is this something that has been forgotten?

Yeah, and a large number of clay tablets found were training tablets. At any given time, there may have been more students working on properly learning the mechanics of writing on tablets then tablets in circulation so a surprising number of what is found is, basically homework, or apprentice practice.

Never did. However, I discovered that unlike delivering a monologue about the subject, which unnerved me, answering questions didn't unsettle me. So rather than preparing a long speech, I just prepared a short "in a nutshell" speech, and then offered, "I'd like to hear what you think about the subject. Let's talk about what you want to talk about. Let's open the floor to questions." Interacting with questions proved more interesting, and somehow less threatening to me. And was more interesting for the audience. So my strategy was to launch into the question period as soon as possible. It worked great for me.

Recommendation: The VHA is to implement continuous monitoring in all server rooms to detect compliance and risk issues associated with the organization's cats.

Response: The VHA concurs with the recommendation.

Oh man. That was 50 years ago. I do recall that my instructor that offered to put in a word for me so I could audit was Professor Flowers, very nice woman.

Pulled into a rural Louisiana driveway visiting a friend. And out in the back yard, they were cutting off the tail of an alligator with a small chain saw. Apparently the tail is where the good steaks are, but I didn't stay for dinner.

The story reminded me of an old joke about Louisiana:

In Louisiana, the zoos have signs for each caged animal. 1. Name of animal. 2. Name in Latin. 3. Geographic distribution. 4. Recipe.

Early 70's, UT Austin, my Eng lit instructor said she could swing it to allow me to audit the visiting author writing class next door that begin when our class ended. "He's writing in the Western genre," and I never bothered. I was pretentious about literature then and rather sniffed at the notion of anyone writing westerns. It was Larry McMurtry, and of course I curse my young arrogant self now. I'm still mad at him, furious with myself and the opportunity I missed.

>I think the reasons are far more political than technical.

You may be right but sometimes the local optics track better when a political reason is given and the local authorities might also expect better compliance with political reasoning. Similarly, "We are getting pwned," never tracks well. There are solid reasons, long ago, why China stopped using Nortel.

Rolex simply wants to further their control over their brand. There has been a feeling for some time that authorized Rolex retailers, by poor customer service and unauthorized practices have diminished the brand's value. By extending their reach into retail, Rolex can standardize and control customer service, reduce the unwanted stories of customers being treated poorly, and as a side benefit, control the signage, display and presentation at their retailer. It's a smart move.

Can confirm. In Germany, recipients of a US visa often complain that their title isn't used on the visa, only their name. Especially PhD visa applicants.

Probably my worst memory of around 3rd grade was when I left the swing in such a high and terrifying arc, that I shat myself when I landed. Also my first introduction to Mother's Logic after I explained why I propelled myself into the air: "If the other boys jump off a cliff, are you going to do that too?"

>They aren't looking to unsettle the dollar, but be less reliant on it.

The prominence of the dollar, aside from US productivity and scale, and the reasons why it is the most exchanged currency in the world, is due to its stability, or in other words, how well it holds value over time. That's pretty much it.

However, "that's pretty much it" rather understates the difficulty of achieving the same thing in currencies of countries that lack fiscal transparency, political stability and have higher levels of corruption and volatility in banking sectors.

It's not a secret formula. If the BRICs countries succeed in the political reforms needed to establish currency confidence in their alternate reserve to which investments can be pegged, the world might be a better place. So here's hoping.

>Best thing to do is disconnect and power electronic devices off prior to presenting yourself at the border.

I might argue that unpowered mobile devices, including laptops, bring attention to the devices.

Border inspection types are certainly inclined to ask that you power your devices if they are off - at least they often do with foreigners entering Germany.

It's almost intuitive if you consider the distance from Bangor to LA is pretty much the same distance as Madrid to Moscow. Think of the diversity between Madrid and Moscow. Bangor to LA won't take you through an equal amount of diverse cultures, the US is a single country after all, but the diversity is certainly there.

I'm not sure the headline understands that scientists can be wrong their entire careers but still be excellent scientists, doing excellent and even influential science.

"A black body claim for short wavelengths blew up academia. Science punctured it so resolutely that the claim is now called an ultraviolet catastrophe!".

Poor journalism, and as such, click bait. The watches are non-functional and selling for less than 3 dollars in vending machines. Now, if Casio did manage to shrink their best sellers and sell them for orders of magnitude less than their normal sized products, I might shout, "I'll buy that for a dollar!" But no need to shout. These are simply wearable toys and not timepieces.

In Alaska, I was told to never camp near where blueberry bushes were widespread. "It's like camping near a watering hole," I was told. "Every damn animal in the area likes blueberries, including bears and wolves."

Around '84 doing seismic data. We just got a terminal in the office that would allow you to monitor the jobs running on the IBM mainframes downstairs. Completely new tech to all of us. It had a command line message capability. Because it was quite easy to send to all instead of just your recipient, one marriage ended rather suddenly. Seeing the effects of your actions with new tech in real time indeed.

>In practical terms, Ukraine would probably emerge very quickly as the leader of a hard-line group of anti-Russian nations, calling always for a more confrontational policy and more hawkish positions and statements about Russia.

It seems rather in the natural order of things that an invaded country would be antipathetic to their invaders, yes, and might hold those objections post-war. Perhaps that might explain similar sentiments from the long-memory Finns.

I do hope and believe, perhaps without merit, that should European political gravity and intellectual influence shift eastward, that the European story may benefit in surprising ways. The author seems to disagree.

For those who believe the US has a perfidious hand in every geopolitical event, by logical extension, Ukraine has no agency in the face of such tampering. It's clear to such thinkers that Ukraine seeking to avoid imperial conquest is a mask to hide US puppet strings.

Perhaps a useful counterpoint to such thinking is to discuss these beliefs with a Ukrainian.