And also to everything else.

Get ready for the “full self-driving” defence.

Yes, but politicians and police keep fantasizing about a magical crypto-backdoor that only they can use, no matter how many times people explain this to them or how many times they get burned.

He has found an efficient way to damage every economy and the planet at the same time.

FBI Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran said, “The FBI has been really, really consistent about our stance on lawful access encryption. We’re actually big, big supporters of it, but it has to be reasonably responsibly managed so that we can get what we need on the other side.”

So they want to keep the backdoors but have the Chinese government stop naughtily using them when they’re only for American use. Good plan! A quick call to Xi Jinping should sort the whole thing out.

That’s a very cheap plane, based on my occasional “I wonder how much x costs?” internet searches.

Does Steam ever deliver Linux-native builds instead of running games through Proton?

“If each year we lose 30,000 young, able-bodied people who could work for another 20-30 years, that is an additional loss [to the economy],” he said.

Depressing that it has to be explained in terms of the economy to get people to care.

It is if your main goal is to please billionaire oligarchs.

It’s a “Labour” government, featuring the corpse of the Labour Party haunted by the ghost of Margaret Thatcher.

Accounts differ but most reports say a low number of years. Older flash memory is more stable than the newer stuff, because it only stored one value per tiny capacitor, so the charge had to drop by 50% for the bit to be lost. In newer flash memory they use each cell to store more than one bit, which means they need to make finer discriminations between charge levels, so there’s less tolerance for weakening charge levels. Many people report losing data after only a couple of years unpowered with modern devices. Some older devices can go for more than a decade. I don’t have any studies to hand but if you search for information about bit rot in flash memory you will find plenty of discussions online.

If you power up the device and read all the data, this will refresh the charges.

It will. A pandemic response requires cooperation and coordination around the world. The USA will not cooperate with anyone, and the most deluded antivaxers are going to be the running US health policy this time. RFK wants to defund vaccine research, dismantle scientific institutions and withdraw even well established vaccines from the market. So any virus that starts to circulate will find a huge pool of unvaccinated people in the USA, where it can continue to circulate and mutate and reinfect other countries.

And from what I’ve read, the bird flu has a human mortality rate of about 51%, compared to COVID which was around 1 or 2%. With luck, that will actually prevent it spreading too widely, but it could be very bad even if it becomes less aggressive. And clearly it’s capable of spreading widely in other species while maintaining a very high mortality rate. So the world needs to be very ready, not arguing about whether the medicines that have protected people from serious disease for hundreds of years should be abandoned because some guy’s brain worm told him so.

The device itself degrades from writes, but the data degrades anyway as long as it is not powered. The bits are stored as charges in tiny capacitors, and if you leave it unpowered this charge gradually leaks away, leading to data loss over the long term. The device needs to be powered up to be able to refresh the charges and preserve the data.

My understanding was that flash memory, especially modern flash memory with tiny gates and multiple bits per cell, degrades the fastest of all storage media (possibly apart from badly made plastic discs). Especially if it isn’t regularly powered up, the memory cells will just use their charge after a while. If you used three it would reduce the risk, but if they’re all degrading untouched at the same speed they might still all lose data around the same time.

They’re pretty expensive.

Corporate encouragement.

The lifetimes have improved, but according to your link, the currently measured average age of a drive at failure is 2 years, 10 months. They expect that to increase as they roll over to newer, more reliable drives. These drives are under heavy use, unlike drives used for offline storage, but still it’s not really the kind of lifespan you’d ideally want in an archival medium.

That’s the reaction Netanyahu wants people to have. It allows him to deflect all criticism of his government as mere prejudice, and to guilt people into silencing their criticisms. Don’t play into his hands.

That’s technically promising, but I can’t see it being a mass-market item since most people don’t care about backups, so it will likely be prohibitively expensive for most home users.

Seems like the world has decided to re-learn the lessons about fascism the hard way.