ignirtoq

Viruses evolve, some quite quickly. The flu isn’t the fastest (looking at you, HIV), but it’s up there. Over time, existing vaccines train your body to fight something that doesn’t quite match what’s in the wild (i.e. efficacy goes down with time). That’s why there’s a different seasonal flu vaccine every year.

They create flu vaccines on a yearly cycle, and a pandemic can kick off in a matter of weeks and months, so if it doesn’t match the preplanned cycle, they’ll have to invest more resources to creating the most up to date vaccine off-cycle.

I think it was pine, actually, but it was over 10 years ago so I can’t say for sure.

Not only did my math master’s thesis adviser use Linux, he read his email from a command line program and wrote his papers in plain TeX, considering LaTeX a new fangled tool he didn’t need.

The 10th amendment doesn’t change the supremacy clause. It simply makes explicit what’s implicit in the supremacy clause: federal law takes precedence over any and all state laws and constitutions when they are made in pursuance of the US Constitution, so the 10th amendment clarifies that if it’s not a power granted to the federal government by the US Constitution, then it’s reserved for the states. To invoke the 10th amendment in this case you would have to prove the federal government is acting beyond its constitutional scope, which would require either proving it’s going beyond EMTALA or that EMTALA itself is unconstitutional. They are not making either claim in this case.

and whether you like it or appreciate it or not, he’s got a history of public service

Would that be the charity that’s a front for embezzling charitable donations, or the presidency that he used to enrich himself by vacationing in his own properties, requiring the federal government to pay exorbitant, arguable falsely inflated, prices with taxpayer money for housing the Secret Service in Trump properties and selling national secrets to hostile governments?

Republicans in Idaho asked the Supreme Court to decide whether state bans or federal law take precedence.

This is absurd. Federal law always takes precedence, even if it’s a section of a state constitution versus a law passed by Congress. Period. It’s the supremacy clause of the US Constitution, and it’s quite clear. The supremacy clause doesn’t cover executive order, but this case is about EMTALA, a law passed by Congress.

Now if they want to argue the Biden administration’s enforcement of that law is going beyond the bounds set by the law, that would be something SCOTUS would need to decide. But as far as I can tell they aren’t arguing that. They’re saying if the Court lets the Biden administration require emergency abortions in opposition to state law, then that will let them require elective abortions as well, which is an even more absurd claim since the scope of EMTALA is strictly for medical care when the health or life of the patient is at risk without it.

This will be an unpopular opinion here, but Biden has been backed into a corner on this. The immigration system is fundamentally broken and not equipped to deal with modern needs, but that has to be fixed by Congress. Biden had legislation he was favoring, and regardless of what your opinion on it was, Republicans made it clear they won’t let absolutely any changes to immigration happen with a Democrat in the White House, no matter how much they may agree with them.

His options under executive action are extremely limited. The strategy of letting the system flounder to illustrate the need for reform has only worked against him, so now he’s trying something else. I don’t agree with the current system, the reforms that he proposed, nor this executive order, but man, there just isn’t a good solution here, and he’s feeling the political pressure on it, which while it may be misdirected is nonetheless real.

I find the very term “content” fascinating, because the exact definition you choose puts it on a kind of spectrum with “useful” at one end and “measurable” at the other.

When Daniel Ek talks about “content,” he means any pile of bits he can package up, shove in front of people, and stuff with ads. From that definition, making “content” is super cheap. I can record myself literally screaming for 30 seconds into the microphone already in my laptop and upload it using the internet connection I already have. Is it worth consuming? No, but I’ll get to that. And content under that definition is very measurable in many senses, like file size, duration, and (important to him) number of hours people stream it (and can inject ads into). But from this view, all “content” is interchangable and equal, so it’s not a very useful definition, because some content is extremely popular and is consumed heavily, while other content is not consumed at all. From Daniel’s perspective, this difference is random, enigmatic, and awe inspiring, because he can’t measure it.

At the other end of the spectrum is the “useful” definition where the only “content” is good content. My 30 seconds of screaming isn’t content, it’s garbage. It’s good content that actually brings in the ad revenue, because it’s what people will put up with ads to get access to. But what I would consider good content is not what someone else would consider good content, which is what makes it much harder to measure. But we can all agree making good content is hard and thus almost always expensive (at least compared to garbage passing as content).

And that’s what makes Daniel Ek look like an out of touch billionaire. The people who make good content (that makes him money) use the more useful definition, which is difficult to make and expensive and actually worth talking about, while he uses the measurable definition that’s in all the graphs on his desk that summarize his revenue stream.

Oh absolutely. With the rising food prices, my family has had to shift to making those rotisserie chickens a regular part of our weekly plans to keep our grocery bills down. (We eat the meat and then boil the bones/carcass into broth, which we can have as another meal of soup.) As prices continue to rise, they become a better and better deal.

To be fair, Costco has acknowledged they lose money on the sausages (and rotisserie chickens) and use those cheaper items to draw in customers to buy other things they do make money on.

I don’t think our current system is nearly as robust as you think. Trump’s first term laid that bare.

So many laws dictating what the president can and can’t do don’t have any actual repercussions for breaking them written in them because it was assumed impeachment would be sufficient. Trump showed that with our current system that means if you can’t guarantee you’ll have 67 votes in the Senate, then those laws may as well not exist. And every week the Supreme Court shows how much “settled case law” isn’t anymore, so with a corrupt high court in his league, even the laws that do have teeth may be subverted.

We absolutely need to make changes to shore up the system and plug the gaps, but we have to do so with care that we don’t end up handing new, more powerful weapons to the very bad actors we’re trying to protect against.

Totally agree. These systems are critically important for our society. They need to be considered with care, and we need to be mindful of the complexities that come with any changes to them.

Super easy for those in power to keep their rivals from being able to run for office. Currently the president and afraid you’ll be unseated by the opposing party’s candidate? Just start an investigation on them! Boom, no more rivals.

No, it doesn’t say why. And it also doesn’t actually say Biden spent that money. It says Congress “allocated” $7.5 billion. There are plenty of processes between allocation and actual expenditure that could be holding this up.

The attack vector described in the article uses the VPN client machine’s host network, i.e. the local network the device is attached to. They don’t discuss the DHCP server of the VPN provider.

I hate this basic assumption that privatization will lead to cost reduction unless proven otherwise. Cost reduction is a question of optimization of process combined with requirements for quality. You can either make what you’re doing more efficient or reduce the quality. The military can be extremely efficient when it wants to, so I’m not surprised at all that when outsourced to the private sector, costs didn’t go down. There was probably just no room to optimize given the existing requirements, and then private companies had to make a profit, so quality had to go down.

Smith said that she’s also curious how this research would translate to non-domesticated cats like big, wild cats.

I’d love to see this experiment performed with big cats at zoos. I think zoo-goers might get a kick out of it, too.

stop doing math

The article touches on that. VPN traffic is itself a small category, so even if we assume all VPN traffic is torrenting, that doesn’t push it very far up the charts.