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Same here. The missus is almost crawling on the walls due to the lack of social contact, while I'm having the time of my life; the lack of social interactions gives me so much extra spare time.

> in terms of excess deaths all Nordic countries look identical Finland, notably, doesn't even count covid deaths outside hospitals according to the THL, so comparing Swedish and Finnish covid stats is a bit silly

Where did you get those numbers from? EUROMOMO doesn't include data from Iceland, but for the rest it's obvious that Sweden is an outlier in regards to the overall mortality rate: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#z-scores-by-country

Denmark, Finland and Norway are below the normal mortality rates for 65+ since the lockdowns began. Sweden is clearly above. I assume there's not another epidemic over there that we've missed?

Again, I'm not saying the Swedish strategy is wrong, I'm just saying that the failure to protect the elderly has invalidated Sweden as a data point.

There has definitely been a bunch of deaths related to COVID-19 in Finnish retirement homes, but in terms of overall mortality rates for people 65+ it's quite obvious that it's not a big problem. Actual COVID-19 diagnoses are still reported by THL, including everyone who gets diagnosed by the public health system in Finland. Finland has unrelated, considerable, issues with care for the elderly, but that's a completely different topic. :)

> Let's not forget that lockdowns were a knee-jerk reaction enacted by scared politicians, not a carefully considered and data-backed policy.

Definitely. Lock-downs are last-resort measures taken when you've already failed to do what you should have done in the first place; extensive testing of travellers and contact tracing/quarantine of people who are sick. The other Nordic countries failed miserably in that regard.

Yeah, pretty much every single "smart" device I've ever bought has had vulnerabilities that never got patched. It's ridiculous.

On the plus side, my 10 year-old laptop still finds a use as an access point/firewall for all those things. :D

I have a dummy hotspot with no access to anything whatsoever, and which I allow my TV to connect to. Apart from exposing an undocumented API (with code execution capabilities), and allowing logging in as root over Telnet (without a password), it also tries to fetch software updates over plain HTTP. It's a bloody nightmare.

On the plus side, it was possible to disable many of the smart features once I discovered the telnet capability. :D

Sweden failed to protect their own elderly, mainly because national authorities simply assumed that local authorities were ready to fight a pandemic, when they were in fact hopelessly underfunded and staffed by underpaid staff with no PPE and who were expected to do stay at home on their own initiative and without payment if they got sick.

The same happened in a few places here in Finland, and I am quite certain that if we'd let COVID-19 through retirement homes the way our dear neighbors did, we'd have a much higher death-rate.

The actual Swedish stragegy, i.e. a soft lock-down with strong recommendations and only minor restrictions in travelling and gatherings, could actually have worked. Unfortunately, we'll never know as they screwed the retirement home situation up as bad as they did.

Pretty much. We wanted a simple life and we got it. Only going to the supermarket twice a month saves a ton of money, and working remote saves me a lot since there's no commute.

> They are toast.

Many traditional petrol stations are toast already. The one in the village where I live closed decades ago. The one in the next village only survives because it's got a fairly successful tire business run by the owner's son as a side gig, and because it's the only place in a 30 km radius where you can buy basic necessities like toilet paper, toothpaste, and basic foodstuffs, as well as other goods like beer and soda.

If that place had to survive on the money from petrol sales alone they wouldn't have been there. If there's a demand for charging stations I'm sure they'll adapt. :)

It was a cool machine, and AmigaOS was simply awesome compared to contemporary consumer operating systems, but alas Commodore went belly-up before they managed to modernize the platform.

This. I've used it extensively and it's simply unparallelled.

Semi-semi-related, there was a commercial distro named Amithlon that booted straight into AmigaOS 3.9. Alas, it was discontinued, but it had a really nice AmigaOS feel to it.

It isn't, really. The command-line is a beautiful thing!

Definitely. It affects then entire experience to such an extent that you want to go to bed early in order to lie between freshly dried sheets.

Let's hope someone with a similar view-point doesn't discover Earth, then! :D

Jokes aside, you are right, of course. We don't have to worry about environmental effects or native populations in the same way when dealing with off-World colonies on sterile worlds. That alone should provide some incentive for commercial exploitation of things like asteroids; at some point Earth will either run out of certain elements, or other factors will result in certain elements being more easily obtainable off-world.

There are some latency involved when it comes to interplanetary exploration, not to mention communication between planets. That alone gives human exploration a certain advantage in some cases.

I suspect the majority of future exploration will stay robotic though. There are going to be some high-profile missions, but once we start looking more at asteroids and other targets far out in the solar system, then robots will continue to do the bulk of the work.

As far as I am concerned, the major breakthrough here is the reusability that SpaceX is bringing into the table. If we can lower prices of sending stuff to outer space, then we'll be able to do so much more with current space exploration budgets.

It's definitely an alternative to text-based browsers if you need something dead simple. And it's fast enough to run on an old 486 if needed.

It is definitely possible to get it up and running, but there's often problems due to entire ranges having bad reputation. There was a gigantic thread about it in the Mailop mailing list last year. If you have access to it's archives then it's definitely a worthwhile read (and entertaining too!).

That sounds like Dillo using a TOR proxy. It's quite usable, but it's limited CSS-capabilities break more sites than the missing JS support does.

Just an addition to that: Don't use the cheapest possible provider available if you get a VPS to use as an email server; chances are the spammers are doing the same thing and that your emails will be sent straight to spam.

DigitalOcean, OVH and Hetzner are especially difficult. It is possible to run an email server there, but getting the IP reputation up will be a tedious process and some providers will simply reject sent emails simply for using one of those hosts.

Yeah. Makes the rest rather unneccesary.

Well, there is a lot of graduates from those universities to begin with, so it's only logical that there is a certain amount of useless graduates that end up unemployed. The same logic applies to the rest of humanity.

The real question is whether those graduates are more likely to be useless and unemployed than people who did not graduate from the same universities.

Yeah, the current offerings just won't cut it for professional use though, which I suspect account for much of chainsaw emissions.

This. A 5l can of fuel is easier to drag along and I suspect current battery tech won't be good enough for professional use.

I have a chainsaw that runs on mains power. It's really nice (and quiet) for smaller tasks close to the house, but it doesn't help once you get outside extension cord-range.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I was working for a call centre providing support for Dell at the time, and the year before this was introduced we had a LOT of customers who got their laptops fried by dodgy chargers.

I'm not qualified to answer whether the ID pin constitutes DRM, and whether it is legal or not, but Dell's customers definitely were having issues with dodgy chargers before this was implemented. The implementation sucks though, as the design means it's easy to short the ID pin, rendering the charger useless.

Yes, hybrids are definitely a viable use-case. There are also other applications where a combustion engine makes much more sense, especially if this design can be used for smaller engines like chainsaw engines and lawnmower engines.

The article doesn't mention what kind of fuel this new engine uses, but if it can run on ethanol, or synthesized hydrocarbons like E-diesel then this could definitely be a good thing.

Yeah, and here in Finland we have North American Beavers too, since someone decided to introduce them in the 30's. They have a somewhat devastating effect on the local forests...

I think the largest change will be that we, as a global society, have discovered that there is a lot of things that are easier and better done remote, and that we will keep doing those things remote once we're done with the pandemic (whenever that will be). Working remote, as you mention, is one of those things.

Other things are clearly more efficient face-to-face, and in those cases things will probably go back to normal when it's possible.

Tourism will be... changed. At least here in Europe, the authorities are already talking about less international flights, focus on the train network, and so on, in order to see a more environmentally friendly post-COVID world. People aren't going to stop vacationing or something like that, but there's a chance that things like two-day train rides to Italy will become a thing again. My personal anecdote is that people seem to be restoring their old caravans and going camping this year. The main roads here have been with filled with caravans and RV's the last couple of weekends.

We do have the same issue here in Europe, albeit at a smaller scale. If the old dams can be re-purposed and brought back to use, then that would be a nice compromise.

Some old dams and sluices are beyond repair, though. In those cases it's better to just restore the rivers as far as possible.

The grandparent does have a point when it comes to assigning blame; when you have a hardware-based solution then one can always blame the hardware manufacturer. If you use an open-source solution then there is typically no warranties, and then blame therefore falls upon whomever implemented the solution.

Management likes accountability so the above isn't going to change any time soon.

Now, obviously, the way around is to use enterprise-level solutions based on software. It is often more expensive than the hardware route, but as you say, there are plenty of vendors who do offer such solutions with a proper SLA.

I cancelled mine a few months ago, and could do it through Microsoft's web site. It was a pain to find the option though.

The best way to handle Xbox payments is to buy pre-paid codes in the store and use them (assuming that's an option where you live).