The problem is that you have to go examine (dig/dive/whatever) the potential sites to get real feedback -- otherwise, you're just training the model based on your own prejudices about what good sites look like.
347 karma · joined May 26, 2014
Take the recent 737 MAX debacle as an example. Its MCAS hadn't been proven to be dangerous when it went into production, but it turned out that it was. Result: two airplanes fell out of the sky and 346 people died. It's the FAA's job to prevent this sort of thing from happening, and in this case (unlike the 737 case) they're doing that job.
So what about "BA"? To keep these sequences from getting too long, they assign aliases, and BA is the alias of B.1.1.529 (they ran out of single-letter prefixes a while ago). So BA.1 is short for B.1.1.529.1, and BA.2 is short for B.1.1.529.2, etc. (And since these are all in the Omicron family tree, they're all classed as Omicron subvariants.) Similarly, the original Delta variant was B.1.617.2, which was assigned the alias AY, so AY.1 (=B.1.617.2.1), AY.2 (=B.1.617.2.2), etc are all Delta subvariants.
The current full lineage list is available at https://cov-lineages.org/lineage_list.html. Note that they're tracking variants in far more detail than any non-virus-nerd cares about. If I'm counting right, there are 1575 non-withdrawn lineages listed, including 210 in the Delta family.
Analogy 1: the reporter got a letter from DESE, and noticed that there was confidential information printed on the inside of the envelope.
Analogy 2: the reporter got a letter from DESE, and noticed there was a block of intra-office info (document ID, routing codes, etc) at the bottom, and that contained confidential information.
In either case, the critical thing is that the information was sent to him, just in a form/place people don't normally read.
And even if omicron is drastically less severe than delta, its going to have a hard time being less dangerous or more effective vs delta than vaccination.
Look at all the places in a standard authentication flow where the plaintext password is exposed:
- Any TLS-stripping middleboxes on the client's network. (My personal security nightmare is that someone finds a vulnerability in one of those, and hacks them to scrape anything that looks like a password.) BTW, remember when Kazakhstan did this to their entire country?
- Any TLS-terminating load balancer/front-end-server/etc at the server side of the network.
- Potentially between the front-end server and a backend that does the actual authentication, depending on how traffic is passed there.
- Finally, the server that's doing the authentication -- the password will at the very least be exposed in memory there, so anyone who can read its memory (or modify the server code to leak the passwords) can collect passwords in plaintext.
You're right, it's not like polio. In 1952, the worst polio outbreak in US history caused 3,145 deaths and 21,269 cases of paralysis (of varying levels) (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polio#Epidemics). In the last roughly-year-and-a-half, COVID-19 has caused 716,370 reported deaths (ref: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100k..., but it'll probably be higher by the time you check).
So COVID has been killing people at over 100x the rate of polio at its worst.
Also, polio didn't overload the capacity of the healthcare system the same way COVID keeps doing. This causes consequences for people without COVID who need access to healthcare.
>I had covid, it was like a really bad flu.
COVID has highly variable symptoms; taking your particular experience as typical is a mistake. In a lot of cases, COVID is asymptomatic. In another lot, it's roughly like yours. In a smaller, but still significant fraction, it's much more serious, involving hospitalization. (Also, something like half of symptomatic cases involve ongoing "long COVID" symptoms.) In an even smaller, but again still significant (see above) fraction, it's fatal.
If you have a way to increase the renewable capacity to make up for a decrease in nuclear production, why not do that anyway, and shut down more coal production instead of nuclear?
If you don't own a Mac, you don't own macOS. If you own a Mac and some other computer(s), you own macOS for the Mac, but not for the computer(s). You might've purchased an upgrade to a newer version of macOS, but if you don't already own a Mac, you don't have something to upgrade, so the upgrade doesn't grant you ownership of macOS.
Now, from a legal point of view, it's a good deal different from (and more complicated than) that, but that's the basic idea. So don't make the mistake of thinking that because Apple gives macOS away for free to Mac owners, and don't use elaborate and onerous copy protection or license-tracking nonsense, that you're entitled to install it on something other than a Mac.
And it's not just a matter of protecting you against out-and-out malware (although that's certainly part of it), it's a matter of protecting you against developers whose interests don't entirely align with yours. Developers who really want to spy on their users seem to be the biggest group (see, for example, the recent Apple vs. Facebook kerfuffle).
Unfortunately, distrusting software does add friction, especially if you add (/update-via-unsupported-mechanisms) new software frequently. "Are you sure you meant to run this program? It looks weird to me; I think you should get rid of it. Should it really have access to your contacts/camera/etc?" macOS is acting a little like an overprotective parent here, and it's certainly annoying. But the threats it's trying to protect you from are real. You can turn the protections off (with a certain amount of work), but then you're vulnerable to all the stuff it's there to protect you from.
P.s. I don't mean to completely defend Apple here. Their preferred solution is to have all software distribution go through their App store... where they get a cut of the price. Which means they're also on the list of developers whose interests don't entirely align with yours.
The nullglob option ('shopt -s nullglob') makes things like 'for f in .txt' work right when there are no matching files, but make other commands like 'grep somepattern .txt' change their behavior in ways that can cause serious trouble. grep (and many other commands), given no files as input, will read from standard input (up to the EOF); if it's running interactively and input hasn't been redirected, this causes the script to hang for no discernible reason. If input has been redirected, it steals input that was presumably meant to be read by some other command. In my opinion, the problems this causes are more serious than what it solves.
The errexit option ('set -e' or 'shopt -s errexit') can both fail to exit when you expect/want it to (several such situations are described in the guide) and also exit when you don't expect/want it to. The guide mentions suppressing unexpected exits with '|| true', but it's not always obvious when this is needed, and it's not even consistent between versions of bash. There's a good parable about this (and some examples) at http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105
I really don't like trying to predict and work around unpredictable features like this; I'd much rather deal with explicit error handling, like 'commandThatMightFail || { echo "Aaaargh" >&2; exit 1; }'
And this is just local & transient. There's a good article that discusses this (and related things) at Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2021/02/19/3-t.... Take a look at the temperature anomaly map at the bottom; it shows a big colder-than-usual area over the central US, and another over Siberia. But it also shows warmer-than-usual areas in between them (around the North Pole), and another in Southern Asia. And it lists the "World" anomaly as 0.0 °C. So it's not that everything was colder, it was just that the cold was in different places than usual, and we happened to be one of the colder-than-usual places.
But that map is just for February 19. When I look at the map for today (https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom), I see a cold area across part of Russia, and another around Alaska, but also warm bands across the Eastern US, Asia-Mideast-part-of-Africa, and parts of Antarctica. The World anomaly is listed as +0.4°C. Neither of these single-day maps tells you that much about what's going on in the longer term.
Similarly, this anomalous cold month in the US was just February. According to the report: "Meteorological winter (December through February) was quite mild and dry across the contiguous U.S. The average temperature was 33.6 degrees F, 1.4 degrees above average, placing Winter 2021 in the warmest third of the winter record. Maine had its third-warmest winter; California had its 12th warmest." So while February was colder than usual here, December and January were warm enough to more than make up for it.
But again, that's just three months in one country. If you look at the US report on all of 2020 (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202012), it was the fifth-warmest on record, and 1.33°C (2.4°F) above the 20th-century average. And globally (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202012), 2020 was the second-highest temperature on record, 0.98°C (1.76°F) above the 20th-century average.
You can certainly find many days and months where it was unusually cold in a particular country or region, and many where it was much hotter than usual in a particular country or region. But that doesn't really mean much of anything; you really need to look at averages over larger areas and longer times.
1) Those who number lists starting at 1.
1) Those who number lists starting at 0.
2.5) Stan Kelly-Bootle, who proposed a compromise.He was in his thirties.
And then there's "Mad" Mike Hughes, who just managed to kill himself in a rocket he was hoping to fly high enough to see that the Earth wasn't curved... or something. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51602655
Organisms are not thermodynamically closed, because they take in both material and some sort of free energy (whether together in the form of food, or separately as in water, air, sunlight, etc), and also emit both waste heat and waste material. Organisms don't even have any (nontrivial) closed subsystems.
Most of the interesting things organisms do -- grow, reproduce, evolve progressively, maintain their states -- run counter to the general thermodynamic tendency for systems to approach equilibrium. This does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because organisms' inputs have lower entropy (and higher free energy) than their outputs. As long as there's more entropy leaving than coming in, internal entropy decrease is allowed by the second law (up to the difference between influx and efflux).
(Actually, I'm cheating a little bit here. Entropy is a property of things, not a thing itself, so talking about it entering or leaving isn't really right. But it acts like a thing, and entropy flux is (usually) well-defined and acts as you'd expect flow of a physical thing to work.)
(BTW, there's a bit of inconsistent terminology here. Physicists call systems that don't exchange either energy or matter with their surroundings "closed". Chemists call those systems "isolated", and use "closed" for systems that exchange energy but not matter. Which physicists call "open". Yeesh. Anyway, this version of the second law applies to physicist-closed/chemist-isloated systems. Organisms exchange both energy and matter, so they're "open" in either terminology.)
They don't seem to have learned from this, which means it's likely to happen again.