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That doesn't preclude that further optimisation of solar panels could stem from research on photosynthesis.

No, they actively lobbied over the years of her reign to preserve their economic benefits. They enjoyed this luxury and made attempts at preserving and expending it. Elizabeth was not a passive victim of her birth circumstances.

I never bought this argument. France got rid of their royal family but the royal palaces and their art still attract millions of tourists each year.

Tourists would still want to see Buckingham Palace and visit the royal gallery even without a sitting royal family.

The Crown Estate is not the private property of the Windsor family though. It is more akin to the wealth of a parallel state. One could speculate that in the event of the abolition of the monarchy the Crown Estate would be taken over by the government (at the very least not become Windsor family private property), in effect making it the taxpayers' property.

I think it's totally fair to feel that they have a life of immense luxury and privilege off of wealth that belongs to the people, while so many people in this country are wondering if they'll have heating this winter.

The "war on terror", like the "war on drugs", is a misnomer though; it's not really a war (although a couple of wars were waged as part of it, or alongside it).

You'll encounter two kinds in most Security Engineer roles:

1) reviewing and advising on engineering work carried by other engineers, so you need to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it that way, and what the more secure alternatives could be, all while taking into account any limitations (time, budget, developer experience). This may include pairing sessions with Software or Platform Engineers when it comes to implementing security-critical bits.

2) building, deploying and maintaining your own solutions to security problems your company is facing. This could be security automation, threat detection engineering, secure-by-default infrastructure-as-code modules etc.

In general you need to be a high-breadth, medium-depth well-rounded engineer to pull your weight as a Security Engineer in a decent tech company.

I was interviewing for Security Engineer positions at FAANGs and put together this list:

https://github.com/serain/crack-sec-eng-interviews

You may find something to pique your interest in there.

Security Engineer interviews tend to cover more ground than some other engineering positions in my limited experience (higher breadth, lower depth).

NB: I interpreted this as looking for things to improve your engineering skills. Security knowledge is always a plus.

I guess those guys aren't real then?

You didn't even check your own link I guess. That group's first attack was in 1984 when they operated out of Egypt and in the south of Israel/Palestine. Not a single one of their attacks happened in Lebanon during the civil war. Their presence in Lebanon starts in 1989, at the end of the civil war, and they have to this day not attacked a Lebanese target.

This confirms the point I've been communicating this entire thread that religion only became a driving force in Palestinian politics and militancy in the 1990s and Palestinian Islamism was not a factor in the Lebanese civil war.

radical Islamist Palestinians who had left Palestine and wanted an Islamic state in Lebanon

This is false and misrepresents Palestinian movements in the pre-1990s era and their objectives in Lebanon. That is all I wanted to point out.

I agree with the rest of what you said though.

There was no "Islamic Jihad" in Palestinian groups before the 90s. Religion wasn't a factor in Palestinian politics or militancy before Hamas, and Hamas only became a big player during the second intifada in the 2000s.

I understand you are from Lebanon and from a sectarian background, but that's maybe partly why you have a biased understanding of the groups, ideologies and foreign players involved. You may want to read some background on the history and the conflict from some other sources maybe starting with [1]. Palestinian militancy played a big role, but their religion did not and they were not trying to ethnically cleanse Lebanon or establish a theocracy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_Civil_War

PLO tried to distinguish itself from Hamas by claiming to be more secular

Hamas was founded in 1989, a bit late for participation in the Lebanese civil war.

Arafat, the leader of the PLO, wasn't christian. That's ... weird you claim this.

I'm talking about the leader of the PFLP, George Habash, which was the second largest Palestinian force at the time and operating in Lebanon during the civil war.

they were trying to kick the non-muslims out of Lebanon by force.

I'm not disputing that the intention of the PLO was to anchor themselves in Lebanon (out of the control of the Lebanese state, even if that meant toppling it) and use it as a base, but I'm going to need some sources for the claim that the PLO wanted to "kick the non-muslims out of Lebanon".

largely as a result of radical Islamist Palestinians who had left Palestine and wanted an Islamic state in Lebanon

Not accurate.

Until the early 90s and the rise of Hamas the most active Palestinian militant groups were secular, some were even Marxist/Leninist (as in, officially areligious).

Fatah, in control of the PLO, has always been secular and the second most active Palestinian militant group during the 1970s was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist organisation led by a Palestinian Christian.

Political Islam as a force in Palestinian politics started in the 90s and only really became a big thing during the second intifada in the early 2000s.

The Wikipedia page [1] makes for an interesting read if you want to understand more about the Lebanese Civil War and the many groups and foreign interests involved in this tragic conflict. As for the Palestinians, they had a large refugee population established in Lebanon and the PLO leadership wanted a base for their militias; the Lebanese state understandably didn't want a parallel state operating with militias within their borders; this lit the fuse on a country with an already fragile sectarian balance and dozens of sizeable minorities that had grief with the state and each other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_Civil_War

Ballerina team told me that in the future Ballerina will not be hosted on JVM.

They also told me that back at Kubecon in 2018 :D

That's not what I understood from this passage:

Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic.

To me this says "we're at the late capitalism stage, and we're dealing with a cocktail of ..."

Regarding police brutality specifically, it's not hard for me to believe that's a symptom of what they're labelling neo-feudalism. Police aren't going around beating up the ruling class. There's probably a direct correlation between where you are on the social ladder and your chances of being a victim of police brutality. That's what you'd expect of a feudal society.

Software Engineers are generally intelligent people.

Intelligent animals need stimulation or they get bored and depressed.

I think collectively, "let's move to Rust" is at least partially because we're not challenged enough by writing the same CRUD app for the 20th time in the same language we've been using for the last 5-10 years, and we want to leave our mark in a new ecosystem by implementing whatever is missing.

Some people want to optimise for "fun/exciting/different" while others seem to be aiming for "known/just works, incidentally boring".

We probably need to find the right middle; how do we keep it fun and challenging while keeping it simple and maintainable.

Blindsight is the best SciFi book I've read, and one of my top 10 books of all time.

It's not for everyone though, I tried to get friends and family to read it, I don't think a single one got through it.

You pretty much need Wikipedia open to make sense of it and meditate on chapters. It's a challenging read.

This trick no longer seems to work on The Economist. Any alternative?

They apparently used some ML to make predictions about the position of the driver and the future position of the vehicle to account for the lag when they pulled the remote trigger from hundreds of miles away.

Shameless plug for something I've been working on: https://github.com/ovotech/gitoops/

I wrote GitOops to map attack paths through GitHub and CI/CD systems, at scale.

As an ex-pentester, for most companies I got to work with, all you need to do is open a PR against the right repositories to take over sensitive production environments. I suspect for most companies, an attacker compromising a single employee/intern with GitHub/Lab access is enough to lead to a disaster scenario.

Sadly, I had to ask myself the same question.

A report came out in the UK claiming widespread anti-semitism on University campuses and made the headlines. They had failed to distinguish between criticism of Israel and anti-semitism in the report, which was very disappointing. There certainly was some clear cases of anti-semitism, but they bundled criticism of Israel and accusations of Israel running an apartheid regime as "anti-semitism".

As you point out, this is not the case here.

There's a few things.

1) One thing to keep in mind is that religion is usually only the backdrop for some geopolitical issues. Yes, ISIS was an Islamist movement, but it was first and foremost opportunists seizing a vacuum of power in Iraq, and the instability in Syria, to put themselves into power. When looked at through that lens, why would a Muslim in Morocco or Algeria or Indonesia care that much about ISIS? Does a Catholic in Rome feel intimately connected to violence in Mexico? Most of them thought ISIS were a bunch of assholes, but it wasn't happening in their backyard.

2) Another thing is again politics. It's good for Arab leaders to criticize Israel and blame it for their problems. (Most of them) don't need Israel for anything. They rely more in China. That's the same reason most Western countries are falling short of accusing China of genocide.

3) From a purely religious point of view, Jerusalem/Al-Quds is a very important religious site Islam. It's the direction they originally faced when they prayed (Mohammed moved it to Mecca later), and is the location from which Mohammed ascended to heaven in one of his visions. China has no religious value.

first of all, half my family are war refugees from a field that is way more dangerous than Israel has been in the last 20 years, so let's talk.

you're making a ridiculous leap from "worked in intelligence for the government" to "starts selling spyware to the worst human rights abusers in the planet". it just looks to me like you're in the camp of "my country can do no wrong".

I'm also British and feel fine openly criticizing my government for selling weapons to the Saudis.

how does selling spyware to authoritarian regimes to crackdown on opposition and activists have anything to do with their own survival?

I honestly just don't care, and I suspect most don't either.

I live in London, so probably not far from the GCP data centre, I have a 50mb connection (pretty average and affordable for London) and I don't see myself ever investing in a console or gaming PC again.

My gaming experience with Stadia is better than "good enough", and that's all that matters. If they can get the good titles, they have me as a customer.

I would settle for a lower quality service than I'm currently getting before I think about buying my own hardware again.

Best of luck.

I'm 32 and just started my data science course. I'm so excited and terrified by what seems to be basic calculus and logic for others.

I'm a pentester/security guy with no formal background in anything. I was a waiter until I was 27, but always hacked and coded around a bit since I was a young kid. I've done well for myself professionally in the last 5 years, I'm good at the soft skills and speaking, but I always felt so inadequate compared to the serious engineers who did "serious" degrees. Hence why I want to get a serious degree to talk serious stuff with my ML engineer colleagues.