And downloading updates is a good thing. Means that the fresh installation isn’t vulnerable to something that was fixed between when the USB / DVD was pressed and the time the person installed it.

Linux has made leaps and bounds with usability and ease of installation but it’s no better than any other modern OS - which is a good thing. Installing Windows from a USB stick is not difficult - the simple path is literally, pick a language, select your wifi, choose who is logging in, click install and go grab a coffee. About the only difficulty if you can call it one is that some installs will ask for a serial number because it’s a commercial product.

Also, the number of questions & buttons during installation is one thing but the certainty of a functioning system is another. Linux is better at supporting old hardware, Windows is better at supporting new hardware. Choose accordingly if that matters.

I don’t even know what this graph is even supposed to mean. Bitch about Windows all you like but the installation process is typically very simple.

It has little buttons on the wheel for left or right instead of a stalk. Problem is when you’re going through a roundabout you’re twirling the wheel around so it is almost impossible to to know where the buttons are at any given point in time. A stalk stays put, the buttons are anywhere depending on where the wheel is at. I think this video demonstrates it most clearly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBFxbKTEWu8

It was designed to cut costs and hope fanbois would think it was innovation. It’s so dangerous a change it should be banned in countries where drivers are expected to properly indicate while traversing roundabouts.

The new Tesla Model 3 should be banned from the whole of Europe until they put the indicator stalk back. It is virtually impossible to safely and legally traverse a roundabout without it.

Imagine the humiliation of that though. I think if they scrape up money Mar a Lago & Bedminister will be last properties they’d sell up. It’ll be random condos and anything else they own outright they can shift. I wonder how many Trump branded properties they actually do own outright though.

I’m guessing not, especially with half his empire in administration. I wonder if Trump is already secretly in talks to flog some of his other properties like his golf courses. I’m sure Scotland and Ireland would be glad to see the back of his malign presence.

I have to wonder how he’d pay the fine given that his NY businesses will be under administration. What else is he going to have to sell to pay it off? And I don’t see banks being very amenable to Trump if he has a massive fine looming. Wouldn’t be surprised if he pulls some bankruptcy BS, not to protect himself from the fine, but all the other people he’s in hock to who might be wanting their money back right now.

It doesn’t have to be an entire service. It could be a Mastodon / Lemmy node under their own control, but they should still mirror the information to other social media platforms, perhaps with a link underneath pointing to their own server as source of truth.

This is quite frankly what all NGOs, news orgs and major companies should do - federate so they can moderate their own message. Seems bizarre to me that the BBC, or UN, or NATO or whatever wouldn’t want to control their messaging this way. But realistically they do need to mirror the message out to other services.

I bet they spam that message through every medium they can - TV, radio, loudspeakers, phone alert, text, traffic signs, all the social media platforms.

Imagine if the only alert of the impending death wave was some federated lemmy server which was having a few network problems that day.

It’s probably one of numerous ways they try and reach people. Wouldn’t be surprised if they have it set up to spam alerts out through various mechanisms including social media. It’s just that one platform is now complete dogshit. Maybe this failure will hasten Twitter’s decline in Japan.

I actually got off my arse and did some productive programming over the Christmas break. Spent too long vegetating in front of the computer watching YouTube vids or playing games.

Well obviously it was a failure and always was going to be a failure. Whereas before there was frictionless trade, travel, employment, living, there is now an ever expanding wall of bullshit and red tape. Getting goods to and from Europe is subject to import duties and delays that just kills trade - why would a Spanish company buy widgets from the UK when a supplier in Germany can supply them faster and reliably without any customs redtape?

It will take the UK years to form other trade deals, none of which will be remotely as favourable as they would get with negotiating power of the entire EU behind them. There have already been noises in the UK press about having to take food from the US which would fail EU standards - bleached chicken, GM crops, growth hormones etc. And that’s because when the US comes to the negotiating table they’re going to bend the UK over and screw them. And China, India and the rest of the world will be lining up for some sloppy seconds.

I think “reasonable” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Whatever price they charge it will be to maximize to Moderna’s profits - i.e. they’ll price it slightly lower than what insurers / national health systems would be stung for what 44% of melanoma patients needing a second round of expensive chemo would cost them but not so high that no one will cover the treatment. So I guess the price is “reasonable”, in that it’ll be cheaper than the alternative but it’s not like Moderna will be charitable or fair about it.

It’s still an amazing breakthrough though.

I was browsing LinkedIn before Christmas and a person popped up in my feed who spent the entire pandemic over on Twitter posting misinformation. This POS dressed up the misinfo as if it were science & statistics even though it was obviously distorted and cherry picked nonsense. He had hundreds of thousands of followers so I think it is reasonable to assume people died as a result of his garbage.

In the UK there is a law called the Cancer Act which was enacted in the 30s to ban advertising or selling of quack cures for cancer and give some means to prosecute offenders. I really wish that act were modernised to ban advertisement or promotion of quackery for any disability, chronic / terminal condition or contagious disease.

I wish. My kids are coeliac i.e., the presence of gluten in food causes the body to attack its own gut.

I’d love if there were a vaccine that they could take once, or even every several months that would let them eat what they wanted. It would have to be something that either turns off the errant immune response altogether or teaches the body to tolerate / ignore gluten proteins.

The article suggests the vaccine prevents the recurrence of a specific cancer by 44% vs conventional treatment alone. So let’s be pessimists and say it only prevents recurrence by 22%. Should we eat our words that still 1/5th of people who’d otherwise die or suffer horribly from a recurring cancer now don’t?

I think I would be more skeptical of the eventual price of this treatment and less about its effectiveness.

In a monolithic system where this happens, your only choice as a user is to walk away entirely. e.g. in Twitter it used to have moderation against the worst people and now it doesn’t and you can choose to stay or go. At least in a federated system if you don’t like the server you’re on you can find another and can even migrate your account to that other server.