Most places in the US will have nothing about severance written down anywhere, but it’s very common to actually pay severance in a mass layoff situation (unless the whole business is going under).

Current IT best practice is that passwords should never expire on a set schedule, but they should expire if there is evidence they’ve been breached.

Medical devices are required to comply with 21 CFR 820 in the United States, which establishes quality management standards. This includes minimum standards for the software development lifecycle, including software verification and validation testing.

In the EU, broadly equivalent standards include ISO 13485 and IEC 62304.

If an OEM wants to do a software update, they at minimum need to perform and document a change impact analysis, verification testing, and regression testing. Bigger changes can involve a new FDA submission process.

If you go around hacking new software features into your medical device, you are almost certainly not doing all of that stuff. That doesn’t mean that your software changes are low quality–maybe, maybe not. But it would be completely unfair to hold your device to the standard that the FDA holds them to–that medical devices in the United States are safe and effective treatments for diseases.

This may be okay if you want to hack your own CPAP (usually a class II device) and never sell it to someone else. But I think we all need to acknowledge that there are some serious risks here.

The Linux software you can get as a regular user from your typical Linux distributions is absolutely not any more secure on average than your typical Windows software.

I say this as someone who writes application programs on both systems.

I think it’s really debatable whether the Linux kernel is really any more secure than the Windows NT kernel. Linux advocates have pushed the “many eyes, shallow bugs” line for a long time, but high profile lapses seem to really have put the lie to that.

If wasn’t full garbage collection in the spec. It was some infrastructure support in the spec that would make it easier to write garbage collectors in C++.

122.75 is assigned for air-to-air communications.

In some ways that’s good: you don’t want someone shouting about “YOU’RE ON GUARD”. On the other hand, in this situation you want to choose a frequency that your target is actually monitoring, and guard may fit that bill better.

Israel has already been fighting a war with Hezbollah that Hezbollah declared. These attacks were fairly specifically targeted at Hezbollah’s military equipment. They have been arguably successful at disrupting Hezbollah’s communications, and likely command and control systems. That by itself is a valid military objective.

To the extent that these attacks directly hurt Hezbollah personnel, and to the extent that they damaged Hezbollah’s morale: those too are valid military objectives.

So “war crime” gets thrown around here quite a bit just because there are high civilian casualties. The facts are twofold: Civilian casualties have always been a part of warfare; and there is no specific number or proportion that makes some act into a war crime. That’s just not how these kinds of laws are written.

I have not yet seen a strong argument for a specific war crime rooted in a specific basis in international law. A lot of people bring up protocols 1 and 2 to the Geneva conventions, but Israel and the US have not ratified those.

There are other conventions that regulate weapons of war, but I’m pretty sure none of them are going to address pager bombs directly. An argument there would have to be at least somewhat creative.

Well, which one is it?

I thought they catch fire and burn down slowly.

Correct. Both the recent pager and radio attacks, and the 1996 cell phone attack, were performed by planting military explosives inside the devices in advance.

There is no magical way to hack the electronics to make a lithium battery straight up explode.

Also, Israel already assassinated someone by exploding their cell phone way back in 1996.

Technically I think that’s still “put us first on the search bar” money. You’re giving the real under-the-table explanation.

The Geneva conventions do not contain the level of protection for civilians that you think.

In particular, Israel has ratified and is a party to the conventions of 1949. After much debate in 1949, those conventions ultimately allowed things like indiscriminate carpet bombing of cities (which the US practiced extensively in the previous war).

Later protocols from 1977 added more civilian protections more along the lines you propose. These protocols banned carpet bombing and introduced the concept of proportionate response into the conventions.

Israel and the United States have not ratified the 1977 protocols 1 and 2 concerning additional civilian protections. According to the text itself, they are not bound by the provisions if they do not agree.

Airplanes are usually limited to land at only around half of the total weight they can take off with.

This isn’t normally a problem for normal trips.

If they went to a higher landing weight, the landing gear struts would have to be designed quite a bit stronger. This would make the landing gear heavier, and that would reduce the useful payload weight in the plane.

None of the current ICBM platforms were designed for missile defense. Missile defense simply did not exist at the time.

Sentinel is busting its budget because it’s renovating and rebuilding all of the ground segments: all of those decrepit silos and computer systems. It’s still money well spent in my opinion.

Missile guidance is not a computationally hard problem, and it hasn’t changed much since the 50s. Terminal missile defense is a fantastically hard problem, and wasn’t mastered until the last decade or two. And the current generation missile defense capabilities still haven’t all been demonstrated in combat.

Having said that, I would generally expect NATO’s missiles to work as advertised in a hot war. And I would plan for Russia’s missiles to be somewhat less effective than they advertise, but still a credible threat.

I’m just repeating what happened or what the plan was the last couple of go arounds, with Napoleon and Hitler.

Napoleon did occupy Moscow, but it didn’t help him very much.

Hitler was turned back just short of Moscow, but the Russian government had all sorts of continuity plans that involved moving further east. Entire factories were uprooted and shipped into the Urals.

1. Even with nuclear annihilation, NATO could still get to Moscow in a three day operation. It’s just a question of which cities back home are still standing.

2. Moscow is not the big prize you might think it is. Russia can just retreat hundreds of kilometers further east and carry on.

3. NATO can do the thunder run, but they are not equipped to win a massive land war in Asia. You really gotta listen to the Sicilian from Princess Bride on this one.

Question, when you move to a new place in Spain, do you need to register residency with the police?

I don’t know if Spain does that or not, but I think Italy does some version.

The United States doesn’t have that, and doesn’t have a national id card. Although most people effectively register themselves to get a driver license, that is only required if you drive. So voter registration nominally provides some way for the government to get the information on residency, which is important for figuring out which local elections you need to vote in.

Now recently, in the last couple of decades, some states started requiring photo id verification to vote. This defeats the purpose of having a separate voter registration system, because you still have to go to the driver registration system to get either a driver license, or a non-driving photo ID. Nevertheless, the separate voter registration system has hung around in every single one of these states, because the real goal is to prevent people from voting.

Not enough mushrooming in that case.

Here’s another factor: The ISS is in a high inclination orbit that is excellent at overflying most of the US and Russia. Not so great as a base for deep space missions.

Both of these astronauts were multiple-mission space veterans before they left. They have space shuttle experience. Sunita has prior command experience on ISS. These two are basically the most veteran professionals that NASA has on the roster.

They have now been resupplied with clothing on a Progress module. I think it was like 45 days before that showed up.

They have both stated that they’re happy for more time on orbit, and I’m mostly inclined to believe them.