Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about.

However, they do offer a “not sure” option, which can be taken if a person knows they’re not informed.

Short answer: if they got it bad, they’re dead or in a nursing home. That’s why they aren’t walking in a mall. They ran out of health.

Long answer: in recent times, there seems to be lower threshold of diagnosis.

But if he truly thinks he can pinpoint exposures that increase autism - things like the exposure to tetraethyl lead which probably increased criminality and decreased mental health - good luck for combing scientific studies. There may be some. But if he’s gonna rewind the age old “vaccines cause” record and replay it, nah, I won’t be listening.

Listing living people as dead in an official database is 99% likely a crime.

I really like to build from zero, but some things are better copied, no matter if you fully understand them or fall short. :)

For example, I’m not qualified to check if Hamilton and Euler were correct - I only do as they explained, and later double-check the output against input.

Indeed, forums are almost gone. In particular, I miss one forum about science fiction, one about aeromodelism, one about electric vehicles (another still exists) and one about anarchism. An interesting hold-out in the country where I live, is a military forum, where rules say that respectful discussion is the only kind of discussion accepted - ironically, the military forum has a peaceful atmosphere. But it could come crashing down much easier than a social media company.

As for why forums disappeared - I think that people became too convenient. They wanted zero expense (hosting a forum incurs some expenses and needs a bit of time and attention), and wanted all their discussion in one place. Advertisers wanted a place where masses could be manipulated. Social media companies wanted people to interact more (read: pick more heated arguments) and see more ads - and built their environments accordingly. Not for the public good.

I think the most urgent job is getting rid of algorithmically steered social media - sites where one can’t know why something appears on one’s feed.

Alternatively, and perhaps more plausibly - people who are new to politics fall for a populist.

I’m a bit scared of where the world is going, but it doesn’t make me vote a local populist. One of the things that helps me recognize a scammer from distance - 3 decades of experience with garden variety politics.

As a happy user of Signal (no bugs or incidents from my viewpoint), I regardless chime in to say a word for decentralization. :)

Signal is centralized:

• there is a single Signal implementation, with a single developing entity
• you have to install its mobile version before you may run the desktop version

There exist protocols like Tox which go a step beyond Signal and offer more freedom -> have multiple clients from diverse makers (some of them unstable), don’t have centralized registration, and don’t rely on servers to distribute messages - only to distribute contact information.

In the grand comparison table of protocols (not clients), Tox is among the few lines that’s all green (Signal has one red square).

/me listening to the sound of a WinXP virtual machine booting under Debian Linux

They can shoot their foot with a grenade launcher next. I’m already out of range.

Came here to post this and say “finally”, but someone had already noticed. :)

There’s a quote that’s probably not from Churchill, but is frequently mis-attributed to him (the actual source is probably Abba Evan, an Israeli diplomat visiting Japan). The distorted quote says something that’s appropriate today:

“You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”

Having once worked on an open source project that dealt with providing anonymity - it was considered the duty of the release engineer to have an overview of all code committed (and to ask questions, publicly if needed, if they had any doubts) - before compiling and signing the code.

On some months, that was a big load of work and it seemed possible that one person might miss something. So others were encouraged to read and report about irregularities too. I don’t think anyone ever skipped it, because the implications were clear: “if one of us fails, someone somewhere can get imprisoned or killed, not to speak of milder results”.

However, in case of an utility not directly involved with functions that are critical for security - it might be easier to pass through the sieve.

Smash anything but a windshield. I’ve needed to violently remove a windshield when replacing it (time was running out and tool shops were closed). Wearing protective glasses and pushing with both legs is what it took to somewhat loosen it, but not immediately remove it. Windshields are a multilayer structure of plastic and glass. Side windows are just glass.

True, but there’s some more.

Over here, ice roads are opened on typical winters on several smaller bays. The instruction to drivers is:

• don’t wear a seatbelt
• if ice breaks, open your door swiftly (get out first, then think about calling people)
• if you can’t open the door, lower your window swiftly
• if you can’t lower the window, break it (the side window, not the windshield - a windshield is multilayer laminate, too strong to break quickly)

Typically, if a car sinks on an ice road, people are likely to get out. A crank-operated window is handy in such a case. But regardless of instruction, sometimes folks do die. :(

In general, I would not like to experience any sort of extreme incident in an over-engineered car. I’d prefer something from the 1970-ties, but with airbags.

Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.

As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in slower than 300 km/h, one or multiple truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.

Both of you are right.

It’s difficult, but how difficult depends on the task you set. If the task is “maintain manually initiated target lock on a clearly defined object on an empty field, despite the communications link breaking for 10 seconds” -> it is “give a team of coders half a year” difficult. It’s been solved before, the solution just needs re-inventing and porting to a different platform.

If it’s “identify whether an object is military, whether it is frienly or hostile, consider if it’s worth attacking, and attack a camouflaged target in a dense forest”, then it’s currently not worth trying.

If they overcome / disable ad blocking, they will lose browser market share - and people don’t design websites for marginal browsers with exotic features.