corty

They were aware there were issues, and negotiations happened on how to fix them, with the French leaving them with the impression everything is good.

The French culture is to never deliver bad news before the deadline has arrived. Underlings will never tell their boss that something is impossible, decisions will be made by grande-ecole-bosses without technical expertise and relationships are valued far higher than knowledge and expertise. You'll always get the first impression that all is well and they'll manage before the deadline. If you need a real non-sugar-coated insight as to how the project is going you need to gather your own data. Discreetly.

However, as soon as shit has hit the fan and bosses got involved, they'll bend over backwards to make things work. But you cannot expect meeting the first deadline, ever. Same for the first budget. Subsequent ones depend on the size of the project.

Yep. France has sufficient votes on its side to veto this. EU voting rules make it easier to stop something than to get something done.

France cannot get the EU behind it.

On the original contract in 2016, Germany also bid and in all likelihood could have won, since Germany has far more experience with building non-nuclear subs with Diesel or fuel-cell drives. France had to start the designs almost from scratch since they offered a redesign of their nuclear subs. France desperately wanted the contract and probably only won the bidding by intentionally bidding too low and too quick, downplaying their technical challenges. This behavior of France has bitten various European supposed allies and supposed good neighbors a number of times. Either they got outbid by a phony French bid. Or they were customers of such a bidding process, getting endless delays and price overruns.

So I'd be surprised if there were any substantial EU backing for France in this matter.

Some of the press coverage back then and now: https://thediplomat.com/2016/01/has-germany-lost-the-bid-to-... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-submarines-comp...

These things, like user accounts, more auth methods, flexible endpoints, IP pools, ..., should be integrated in a product in a secure manner. What wireguard does is the irresponsible lazy approach of leaving everything up to the VPN providers and webinterface-monkeys. Who will surely mess up a lot of the upper layers that provide all the necessary "comfort" features. After which the wireguard crowd will wash their hands with the Jobsian "you are holding it wrong".

There are, but they can only audit and report. Change and punishment would need to happen politically, but that would need a majority of states. Two thirds of the states profit from Laenderfinanzausgleich (to various degrees) and will not change anything.

Lowering rents was part of the plan anyways, I think. Market manipulation through rent caps has been tried before and (in the Berlin version) declared unconstitutional.

Context switching overhead is bad for microkernel performance. All the reasons why the userspace wireguard implementation was slower apply to each and every part of a microkernel system. And all of this got worse with spectre and meltdown, secure context switches are now even more expensive. Modern CPUs generally always increase the context switching cost, they optimize for single-process benchmarks.

So microkernels are dead, performance buries them deeper and deeper.

Problem is, "not be paying market rates" will never happen. Market rates will be paid, because disowning anyone for the public good is only constitutional, if market rates are paid as restitution. There have been lots and lots of cases around disowned people lost by the state because of that.

Berlin doesn't care about money. Back when separated by the iron curtain, Berlin always got a special deal in federal/state finances because of its situation. After reunification, Berlin was pumped full of money because it was the new designated capital city and showpiece for unification. Nowadays, some of the special deals still remain, plus Berlin is awarded absurd amounts of money from the "Länderfinanzausgleich" (state finance balancing mechanism), meaning that the richer German states pay for Berlin's deficit.

So Berlin is in the comfortable situation of that one no-good family member on social security who will always find someone to pay their bills. Why change anything, why stop spending all that money, if more keeps coming without any effort in any case?

Nope, UCS-2. Which is UTF-16, but just the BMP, so only the first 65k codepoints and all characters are fixed-length 16bits. Only later windows versions at some point learned UTF-16.

Well, easy in case of VW: If the optimization involves checking "steering wheel has never moved out of 0 position since engine start" and "intake air is at exactly 293K", then it illegally optimizes for a test.

Red tape. Medical devices need to (depending on type and country) conform to medical device regulations, be approved by a medical device regulator, be sold only to medical professionals or people with a script from a medical professional. Liability in case something goes wrong because of your device is expensive, adversarial and dependent on crossing all the 'i's and dotting all the 't's. There are "lower levels" of this due to regulations being less for more harmless devices. E.g. you can nowadays get thermometer, pulse-oximeter or a blood pressure meter quite cheaply. But anything just mimimally more complicated or critical gets expensive very fast.

Reasons for this beside the red tape are imho the low number of customers (most slightly specialized medical devices are needed once per patient with $rare_disease, once per lab or once per doctors office), the high need for customization (one-size-fits-all doesn't even work for blood pressure cuffs, let alone prosthetics), localization (broken i18n can kill, most customers are elderly and therefore not as versed in engrish), higher component cost (sterilizable plastics are more expensive, bigger displays for vision-impaired elderly clients are more expensive) and acceptance of foreign/small/unknown manufacturers (won't trust my elderly mother's health to a device from "Corty's Refurbished Asbestos Plates, Health Equipment and Luxuries Ltd., Templestreet, HongKong (CRAPHEALLTH)").

There is also a cartel of each medical professionals, manufacturers, insurance companies/public insurance pools and politicians, complete with revolving doors, kickbacks, fake or real -but always suspiciously convenient- scientific data, and exclusionary legal situations. All cementing the status quo and the wealth and standing of all participants (except the patients' of course).

All the Java world is still firmly stuck in XML-land. So a better XML editor in Eclipse is right where it is needed.

Microsoft doesn't cater to the more knowledgeable admin population I guess. They are used to the point-and-click crowd mindlessly accepting every answer as gospel. Because usually you can't prove them wrong anyways, everything being opaque and closed in Microsoft-land. And because of that, MS/Windows admins never learned how to get to the very bottom of things.

Transmission or no transmission is a huge difference in maintenance cost. And land locations south of Hannover are poor conditions for wind turbines generally, with few exceptions. In those cases, earnings can be scarce and things can get uneconomical.

Should have mentioned, I'm running testing/unstable. After the stable release, all the new experimental stuff for the next release floods into unstable.

Agreed. The latest Debian upgrade installed pipewire for me, and I didn't even notice, everything just worked fine! And that after years and years of fiddling with alsa and pulseaudio configs, uninstalling pulseaudio, hacks upon hacks to get stuff working with either, etc.

Another copycat change to get the same crappy non-ergonomics in unrecognizable controls as the others. Can we please fast-forward all the UI circus to arrive at something usable again? Pretty please?

Thank you, your phrasing is far better and clearer than mine.

Well, obviously China is suspected of having let Covid-19 escape, so of course this is first and foremost about restrictions that affect China..

What are you getting at?

Also, of course there are accidents in any lab, most of them just reportable incidents. Why are there almost no reportable incidents from Chinese labs? Usually because either they are not using those labs (unlikely) or because they don't do incident analysis and reporting. That the list contains almost no incidents from China means quite the opposite of what you are suggesting: It means that China regularly covers up even very small mishaps such as a mislabeled sample of something relatively harmless. Just stuff that cannot be covered up will be reported (such as the few thousand people infected with Brucella somewhere...)

Does that mean that all other labs are safe? Certainly not, and I'd suggest you read my other comments about improving safety. But quarantining a researcher after a needle puncture is the right thing to do. Recognizing and reporting the escape of lab animals is a sign of there being at least some amount of oversight. China quite obviously doesn't have that, because noone in their right mind will believe that a lab never has a reportable incident.

So yes, I'd suggest starting at the most unsafe labs, where quite probably Covid-19 originated, and improving those, e.g. by closing them. And rebuilding them somewhere safer, to a far higher standard. Same for the rest of the world's labs, of course, but priority is on those having started global pandemics in the past...

We are already at 4 Million fatalities from Corona, with a probably significant unknown number of deaths in third-world countries without proper diagnostics and healthcare. Vaccinations are still going too slow and will take another 5 years to even possibly cover all humans. Within that timeframe, it is quite possible to approach WW2 levels of fatalities (around 80 mio.). Secondary damage due to hospitals being overwhelmed, imploding economies and hunger will come on top and are still not easy to estimate.

It would be appaling and immoral to let something of this magnitude go unanswered. If someone is responsible, they need to feel the consequences. Because the consequences of not reacting to something like this, and it getting out later, are far more serious and devastating: That would in one stroke wipe out all legitimacy of involved governments, leading to revolutions all over the west (and quite possibly the rest of the world).

There is a long waiting list for research at the south pole. Also, if that research is important enough, it can be sufficiently high-paid, so that people willing to do it can be found. If there isn't enough money for that, that research is obviously not important enough. If it isn't important enough to spend that money on, it also isn't important enough to justify the risk to society.

1. An unsafe lab is one, where pathogens can possibly get out with a non-negligible probability. And where those pathogens are infectious and deadly enough to be of concern.

2. Microsoft products don't carry biological viruses, because most of them are software. Microsoft hardware comes out of China I'd guess. Apple also doesn't produce most hardware in the US. Besides, computer hardware can be sterilized. Biological matter, like food and drink are more of a concern. And there is already a lot of regulation around those, e.g. you cannot get imported German sausage or French cheese in the US, and you cannot get US chicken in the EU for those reasons. You also cannot travel anywhere from an Ebola-affected region for example.

I am very serious. But I'm really not sure what you are getting at.

It is theoretically true. They have changed the protocol at least three times, there are no user-accessible settings (just about:config) to point at your own sync server, there is no documentation. And at their rate of breaking stuff, your sync server will be obsolete as soon as you get it running. Happened to me, will never waste time on it again.

And the open-source version of the sync server is bad software, age-old python, tons of code smells. I'd wager it is not what they are using themselves.

All of them. Even a BSL-4 lab is just a day job. In the evening, you get out of the lab area through the airlock, take off the suit, shower and go home to your family. After shopping and a quick beer of course. Followed by going to the movies.

I imagine we'll see some monumental changes in Chinese lab safety after this, independent of whether or not they believe it came from a lab.

No, we won't. That would be the party admitting it was wrong before, which can never happen outside of a coup.

In that case, diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions would be necessary. One would have to treat the whole irresponsible country harboring an unsafe lab just like that unsafe lab.

I think this is also the real problem around Fauci's financing deception: He knowingly financed unsafe research in China, which not just gave them money but also the implicit acknowledgement that they are doing it right.

I would argue that there is a huge difference regarding the improvements in safety measures, depending on whether there is the suspicion or the proof of a lab leak.

With just the suspicion of a lab leak, there will always be half-measures because of researchers arguing that you are needlessly tying their hands. And there will always be people who believe them, either because they trust those researchers or because they don't want to spend any more money on safety measures.

With proof of a lab leak, nobody would listen to researchers' complaints about those strict safety measures anymore. And having seen the huge cost to society, the evaluation of cost and benefits of that research and its safety will be seen in a totally different light.

Also, having someone to blame would imho rally sceptics and deniers behind a common narrative. There would be a common external threat and a common enemy to fight, meaning that the means of that fight like travel restrictions and vaccinations would be more readily accepted.

There may be proof in there that somebody lied about something related to the lab leak. In this case, of course funding is a trail of breadcrumbs, and even if there were no relation, a coverup would be likely. Because it makes the funders look bad at least.

Real proof that COVID-19 originated in one of the Wuhan labs will probably never be found, there was time enough for a coverup of those facts.

But in any case, whether lab leak or not, a few things have become crystal clear imho: Research must really strongly improve its safety around possibly infectious materials. Even researchers working with the stuff consider a lab leak a real possibility. BSL-1 is practically a clean kitchen and BSL-2 is any common hospital before the current Corona measures. Even BSL-3 and -4 facilities are located in habitated urban areas. Researchers freely enter and leave without quarantine, have contact with an unsuspecting population, go to normal hospitals, infect other patients there. Viruses are much much more dangerous than radioactive or chemical materials. A tiny radiation or chemical leak will have tiny consequences. A tiny virus leak can still infect all of humanity.

Also, I'm not qualified enough to comment on whether gain-of-function research is necessary and useful. But I would strongly suggest that given the possible consequences, together with the aforementioned woefully inadequate safety measures, it should be reevaluated. And confined to lonely islands at the end of the world with monthly airdropped supplies, entering or leaving only once a year after destruction of all samples and two months quarantine.

I would strongly disagree on the sysadmin stuff. Firefox has always had a very powerful settings system. All the stuff you could set in about:config can also be set via a set of configuration files provided by the sysadmin, the user and the distro, each of which can provide defaults, presets or locked non-changeable settings which are hierarchically enforced. Exactly what you need as a sysadmin, cross-platform, could do everything and the kitchen sink, distributable either via your usual config management or LDAP/HTTP/whatever you can script in a few lines of Javascript if you need. GPOs are just a poor windows admin's substitute, they cannot do half of that, even in IE and Edge. Not to mention Chrome, which lags miles behind there.