bell-cot

I know a fair number of Americans who are over 50 years old, and appear fairly intelligent - but who, a while after each election, seem actually surprised and offended that the recently-elected politi…

From news stories of the past decade or few - I was not aware that even mid-sized companies, operating near-exclusively within $countryOfOrigin, showed much actual loyalty to said country.

Big picture answer - because the U.S has very little constituency for economical, timely, and competent construction of actual working infrastructure. Vs. political posturing, profiteering, NIMBYism,…

Similar to the "Gun Club" (and also in the U.S. in the WWII era) was the Bomber Mafia - convinced that lots of long-range heavy bombers could win any war: https://en.wikipedia.org…

That I am aware of, "protection money" clearly implies that the payments are to a criminal organization - which is separate from, and unauthorized by, the established state. The MacRumors s…

But unless the non-privileged users have access to the ssh key files - definitely not allowed in any sane set-up - their MITM sshd will be throwing big, obvious error messages at most of the users. …

So...local politicians, in a market where Apple was making money hand-over-fist, were feeling kinda used. By a huge foreign corporation. And the they started getting sticky on all sorts of regulator…

For an official government web site, FAQs have an additional downside - some people will (perhaps maliciously) regard the FAQ answers as the law . Or as official policy. Or similar stunts. This ca…

In National Security contexts, the "get angry at the weapon seller" response is very strongly correlated with how advanced (in technology, power, and scarcity) the weapon is perceived to be.…

A couple different friends of mine have family members who are bipolar, manic, or hypomanic. From their descriptions of the behavior they've had to deal with... this guy definitely needs to be…

Rather than glib hand-waving in front of the chalkboard...might there be a decent piece or few of RISC V hardware, which could actually be compared to non-RISC V hardware with similar budgets (for des…

Quick impression - the author needs to sign financial guardianship over to his mother, and be evaluated by a good psychiatrist. (Robinhood sounds, at most, peripheral to what happened here. The U.S. …

> ...and let them rot for decades, simply for his private amusement. Maybe I am too straight-laced - but might 's/private amusement/major mental illness/' be appropriate? …

Just once (4th paragraph), the article refers to the object as a "short sword". That strikes me (passably-well-read in some related areas) as very different from "dagger". Any m…

Rightly or wrongly, quite a few people seem to have gotten a bad "Wikipedia is zealous about deleting stuff to [vague emotional speculation] save disk space" vibe. Putting a more-accurate l…

That concept (knowledge debt) makes far more sense for code which is actually run (or could be run) than for a Wikipedia page. Vs. just labeling the page as old, low-traffic, and little-maintained. D…

I sense something else going on here. The mineral dolomite is hardly scarce, and the Pigeon Process (to produce magnesium from dolomite) was invented in Canada in the 1940's.

For a so-so discovery, you need the cred of a high-tier journal far more than they need your paper. For an actual holy grail, ~every journal in the field needs the cred of your paper far more than you…

Hmm. Magnesium is anything but scarce - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium#Occurrence OTOH, it's not used in huge quantities (vs. oil, coal, iron, etc.) - so it seem p…

"With an annual budget of about $8.3 billion (fiscal year 2020), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and univer…

My impression is that a huge - but little-recognized - supporter of the status quo has been the National Science Foundation, and similar outside providers of academic research funding. If the big boy…

1a. semi-skilled labor individually secures each and every truck to its flat car for safety. Figure 8+ hand-tightened heavy chains or freight straps per truck. 2a. if any mistakes were made during …

Perhaps worth noting - nullish coalescing is an old feature of the Unix shell. (From a quick skim through Wikipedia, it seems to have been added to `sh` in System III - released in 1981.)

Obvious counter-move by a company that actually punishes employees taking paternity / maternity leave - punish employees having children.

From a pragmatic user's point of view, that would look just like "Apple didn't happen to notice that I was a target of state-sponsored activity". Recent headlines do not suggest …

Perhaps. But if it is well known that the third rail carries ample electrical power to fry an elephant, then no one intelligent enough to be CEO should ever risk touching it. "The design was no…

This...but did Samsung quietly negotiate a "any further energy supply f*ck-ups are 100% on YOUR dime" deal with the State of Texas, or what? By several accounts, the TX grid got darn close …

When it is an incredibly expensive factory, requiring an incredible level of technical expertise to operate, and air freight from anywhere on earth to your biggest client is scarcely a rounding error …

It's tempting to say that the main reason (for Caucasian American men needing a _reason_ to hang out) is over-exposure to capitalist mass-media - where endless advertising portrays ~all male soci…