corty

Also, in my mind, exchanging Chrome's insistence on Google logins is just the same as Firefox's insistence on their proprietary sync and pocket. I'll say no to every one of those things, because I do value my privacy and none of them provide proper self-hosted options.

The thing is, if you do not like the UI of unity, maybe you'll like Gnome, KDE, LXDE, fluxbox, i3 or ratpoison or .... With most Linux distros, you can have both privacy and your favourite UI paradigm. You usually do not need to suffer in the usability department (or at least not too much).

But with Firefox, all the UI choices are gone now, intentionally sacrificed on the altair of rewrites, UI changes, branding and some dubious security claims. You used to get the choice of vertical tabs (better on todays widescreen laptops), tree-style tabs, Buttons where you liked them, user-provided CSS customization for pages and the UI. Not anymore, all gone (they paid some lip service to some of the above concerns, but nothing relevant, and overall a massive downturn).

Now you only get the take-it-or-leave-it of one crappy and worsening Chrome clone UI.

From their job offers page for a sysadmin/devops position:

> Angaben gemäß GlBG: Das KV-Mindestgrundgehalt für diese Position beträgt € 3,501 brutto monatlich (IT-Kollektivvertrag 2021, ST1 Erfahrungsstufe, Vollzeit = 38,5h), es besteht die Bereitschaft zur Überzahlung.

Seems they are even more stingy than their customers...

That is the plot of some Larry Niven Scifi :)

Not necessarily. I think a belligerent alien civilization might be frequently warring amongst themselves, driving various factions to flee their planet/system/local group. If transport and hiding were easier than seeking out and killing those factions, such a civilization would spread quickly, driven by their belligerence.

Having nukes also keeps all others from attacking, for most second and third world powers the USians are the primary threat due to their very mobile military. But everyone has enemies, Britain and France feared a German resurgence after WW2 as well as a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Israel fears it's neighbors and most muslim states. But in all cases, nukes are there to keep someone you fear from attacking.

And various crises and practical problems causes even the British to not totally rely on US protection. E.g. the Suez crisis and the Falkland war showed them that they need their own military capabilities, because they cannot even rely on the US for support in "small stuff".

I used the list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterforce#Counterforce_disa...

Britain uses Trident SLBMs, so should be capable of such an attack. However, further research reveals similar capabilities of the French M51 SLBM.

All in all I wouldn't give too much on that list of stated or probable strategies anyways. An apparent strategy and the stated conviction to stick to it is necessary for deterrence. But I'm not so sure of what will happen if push comes to shove. I guess every nuclear weapons state has a number of war plans fitting the various possible opponents and strategies, and which one is picked strongly depends on the current mood of the ruler when pressing the red button.

We cannot put our nukes to use beyond say the lunar orbit at the most. They can throw a few cheap but far more deadly rocks at us from the Oort cloud. Just being in a higher orbit with respect to the earth's is totally sufficient advantage for devastating destruction.

The right canister is any of them, most of the isotopes will be bound to dust, and anything you can do to reduce the dust you breathe in helps. Gaseous isotopes like iodine aren't that easy to filter, you are better off taking iodine tablets for that.

Look stupid. The British tested their smaller nukes in the Australian desert, Maralinga.

> In nuclear war, practically all detonations would be airbursts. They don't cause similar fallout.

No, definitely not. It really depends strongly on who your opponent is and what their strategy might be. And on whether they stick to their pre-anounced strategy. And how many exchanges (first, second, third strike) you might get to.

Generally, there are two strategies that are usually distinguished in US literature for leading a strategic (i.e. big, as opposed to small, tactical) nuclear war: counter-force and counter-value.

Counter-value means that your nukes target what values the enemy has by destroying enemy cities and the population and goods/industry/infrastructure in those cities. Destroying a large, non-reinforced, "soft" target like a city with humans in it is more efficiently done by airburst, because the overpressure/temperature effect is weaker but spread over a far larger area. Weapons also don't need to be that accurate, if you miss downtown Manhattan by a kilometer, it won't matter much. Most smaller nuclear powers, those with a no-first-use doctrine and those without accurate fast delivery systems (i.e. modern ICBMs or SLBMs) do rely on a counter-value strategy. The goal there is usually something akin to France: They aim to be able to kill more of the enemy population than there are French to kill.

Counter-force means that your nukes target the enemy military infrastructure, most prominently ICBM silos and command infrastructure. Usually this strategy calls for a preventative first strike with very accurate weapons that can destroy heavily reinforced underground structures surrounded by possible anti-missile systems. Meaning you have to hit the target with multiple ground bursts, quickly and as accurately as possible. Since you have only one try at this, some of your warheads might be shot down and some might miss by a few hundred meters, causing the crater to not destroy that ICBM bunker enough, there will be quite a few warheads on the way to each single silo. Meaning that this supposedly "humane" strategy will produce enough fallout to still kill a lot of the enemies population. One example would be https://www.nukestrat.com/china/Book-173-196.pdf p184, where a US counter-force strike against a Chinese missile silo site out in the sticks would kill between 5 and 20 million Chinese just from fallout. And of course, if your counter-force strategy includes command bunkers near capital cities (ground burst), nuclear submarine bases near other harbors (ground/sea burst) or larger military airports (air burst), you are bombing much closer population centers, also with mostly ground bursts. Most prominent in claiming a counter-force strategy is the US.

So most probably, if your opponent is the US, GB or Russia, you'll receive a large number of ground bursts in the first strike. Only if there still were an exchange after that, would there be any significant number of air bursts.

There are multiple effects, tamper material is only one of them.

Ground bursts also increase the overall amount and concentration of fallout: First, with the explosion closer to ground, more neutrons can reach the ground and activate material there, producing radioactive isotopes from previously harmless earth. The "fireball" is a shell of expanding lower-density plasma which doesn't dampen neutrons as much as gas (especially water vapour) in non-plasma air. So that fireball touching ground produces more activated elements increasing overall fallout. Second, all newly created active elements and more fusion/fission products get bound to ground particles like dust, coral or water droplets if the explosion stirs up more of that. Those particles are larger and heavier, producing a more concentrated fallout closer to ground zero, whereas unbound products would be dispersed higher in the atmosphere without producing too much of a distinctive fallout pattern.

Reading and writing HN comments can suck as much time as social media. I'd say if it sucks too much time for your taste, quit. If it doesn't, good for you.

Yes of course. But some will be more competitve by having less weigth-per-axle. So after one replacement-generation of trucks, roads will be in better shape because trucks are less prone to damage them on average. And in general, trucking goods needs to be more expensive anyways to make less pollution transport options like ships and trains more competitive.

Consumers can also be made whole by removing vehicle taxes on cars or subsidizing other modes of transport that consumers use from those trucking price increases.

It does, however, make sense to take a lesson from medicine: Networked computers with common vulnerabilities are prone to herd infections in analogy to biological epidemics, mass hysteria, etc. So it does make sense to e.g. preventatively quarantine all unpatched windows boxes, prescribe security measures and development practices for those systems, where a network-wide spreading event may be caused.

How does "Engineering is just hard" follow from "despite ample warning signs from inspectors and regulators"?

What does follow from that is "listening to engineers is hard", because it costs money, time and other resources.

GCP has budgets that can be easily configured and enforced.

Because in such schemes, tracking peoples' movements is the actual intent, collecting fees is just a nice side-effect.

Well, not exponentially, it is still just a power law.

But I agree that taxes should be damage-based. Tax those lorries to hell, if they want lower taxes, they should buy one with more axles and more tires per axle.

Plugging all our cattle into a heart- and bloodpressure monitor and doing frequent blood draws from every cow "just in case" is wasteful and unnecessary. There is a balance between sensible general always-available monitoring and special-case-debugging a problem.

My rule for that is: more than once a year or more than 6h? Automate and tool it. Less? SSH or other special-case tools are fine.

Because when your herd of cattle is sick, you need to grab one and have a vet look at it before your whole herd dies from the plague.

You are right, but the point remains: If the name almost rhymes with Zyklon-B, you better find another one and fire the marketing dept...

> Just wait for antivaxers to hear 'DNA' and go wild.

I'm no antivaxer. But given that there are alternatives like mRNA, where including RNA into human DNA is impossible due to missing reverse transcriptase mechanisms: Why should I take the risk of incorporating DNA into DNA, which is possible and frequently occurs with other viruses and gene therapies? Where are the arguments that at least hint at the safety of DNA vaccines, because I see none?

You can pirate GPL software, but not in the way the article describes: If you copy&paste or otherwise link GPL code to your commercial project and then sell that under a commercial non-GPL license, that is pirating GPL software. E.g. what Nvidia and compiler vendors like Tasking selling expensive GCC ports do.

You have to look at the reasons why this behavior is occuring: Viruses get less harmful if it improves transmission. E.g. if you are more active and have a higher rate of contacts, even if infected and sick with a certain strain, that strain has an advantage. With Covid, most of the transmission occurs before symptoms appear, meaning that the severity of the following illness is irrelevant to transmission. In that case, the virus has no advantage from being less harmful.

Also, simpler changes are preferred over more complex ones. Delta probably just has a mutation that allows it to reproduce faster after an infection, meaning that both infectiousness as well as severity of illness go up at the same time. Mutations that increase infectiousness but lower severity are usually more complex, so less likely to occur, especially if not selected for.

Windows UI has always been a shambles. Each version of Windows, Office and VisualSomething has at least one new toolkit. It might even look the same as the other ones that came before it, but internally is a different library with different incompatible APIs, bitmaps, workings, etc. Third-Party tools usually also provide their own toolkits that are sometimes made to look Windowsy, sometimes not.

In some cases, APIs wouldn't be too much of a hindrance, and one could replace one toolkit by a later version with updated designs. But the designs themselves also do have a lot of compatibility problems: It is uncommon in the Windows GUI world to use layout managers (similar to CSS flexboxes and the like) that automatically adapt to different window and UI element sizes. Instead, most widgets are positioned pixel-wise. That is also why most dialogs are non-resizeable and things break e.g. when translated strings have different lengths. So a new design which changes sizes breaks all the pixelwise layouts everywhere.

tl;dr: Windows GUIs and toolkits are usually not designed with compatibility and resizeability in mind and break if you change the looks of anything (beyond just changing colors).

When a server has IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity, i.e. an A and AAAA DNS record, clients would usually try IPv6 first, then IPv4. Now, if IPv6 is broken somehow (as it was prone to be due to tunneling, Teredo and even nowadays stupid ISPs), the client would wait for a connection timeout, then try IPv4, so every connection would hang for one timeout.

Nowadays, most clients, especially browsers, will try IPv4 and IPv6 concurrently and use the connection that comes back with an ack first. This prevents hangs at the expense of a little higher server resource usage.

But the myth of "IPv6 makes things hang randomly" remains.

Most consumer NATs are intentionally configured to be leaky. A commonly used technique is hole punching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_punching_(networking) ), which all consumer NATs are prone to support because otherwise many popular applications such as games, voice- and videoconferencing won't work. There are also formally specified protocols to expose hosts to connections from outside: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Gateway_Device_Protoc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Control_Protocol and others. All this is done with no or poor authentication, so any malware that managed to make it inside your network (e.g. by a guest carrying an infected device) can just request your home router to open ports. There have even been problems where such protocols were open to the outside internet, of course without auth. There have been problems with misdirected exposed ports when hosts go offline and addresses are reassigned. Those just don't make headline news because the protocols work as intended and each misconfiguration is unique, automatic and temporary.

So, first, your IPv4 NAT has crappy security already, by virtue of needing to accomodate services like realtime audio/video/control that won't work properly without incoming connections. Second, IPv6 is supported in the same way, PCP can just do the same for IPv6 firewall rules as it does for IPv4 NAT exposed ports.

There is absolutely no reason to not use IPv4 over IPv6, it'll work the same from an end-user's view. But it'll be slightly less messy because you just configure firewall rules per IPv6 address instead of translating the limited port space of your one external IPv4 address into a number of internal Port/IPv4 combinations. So the chance to screw up is lessened.

The estimated cost structure is 1% webserver operation, 1% indian editing team worsening submitted papers, 1% printing stuff that still is delivered on paper, 2% office staff, 25% advertising, 30% legal cost to harass and prosecute students, researchers and universities, 20% executive compensation, 20% dividends.

I call "predatory" the commercial publishing businesses that profit off the need of researchers to publish and their free work, off the free work of reviewers and conference organizers while seeking extortionist subscription prices from the same institutions that employ the aforementioned scientists.

To name and shame: Elsevier, Springer, deGruyter, Wiley, Nature and lots of other smaller ones.