This is why you would get on the plane and push back from the gate and wait even when there was no chance of taking off. The crews were at least on the clock that way.

The massive tarmac delays only ended because of a DOT regulation.

For those who didn’t know, the previous standard that still applies to pilots is that paid time runs from parking brake release to parking brake set. In fact, the aircraft parking brake is usually connected to a time clock computer system.

A typical domestic duty day might run for 14 hours, but only include 4 to 6 hours of paid flying. The rest of that time is preflight and post flight duty, including safety checks, managing catering, flight planning (for pilots), and a whole lot of waiting around in airports for the next connection.

If the boarding time pay is really only the boarding period, that’s just a small part of it.

Most places in the US will have nothing about severance written down anywhere, but it’s very common to actually pay severance in a mass layoff situation (unless the whole business is going under).

Current IT best practice is that passwords should never expire on a set schedule, but they should expire if there is evidence they’ve been breached.

Medical devices are required to comply with 21 CFR 820 in the United States, which establishes quality management standards. This includes minimum standards for the software development lifecycle, including software verification and validation testing.

In the EU, broadly equivalent standards include ISO 13485 and IEC 62304.

If an OEM wants to do a software update, they at minimum need to perform and document a change impact analysis, verification testing, and regression testing. Bigger changes can involve a new FDA submission process.

If you go around hacking new software features into your medical device, you are almost certainly not doing all of that stuff. That doesn’t mean that your software changes are low quality–maybe, maybe not. But it would be completely unfair to hold your device to the standard that the FDA holds them to–that medical devices in the United States are safe and effective treatments for diseases.

This may be okay if you want to hack your own CPAP (usually a class II device) and never sell it to someone else. But I think we all need to acknowledge that there are some serious risks here.

The Linux software you can get as a regular user from your typical Linux distributions is absolutely not any more secure on average than your typical Windows software.

I say this as someone who writes application programs on both systems.

I think it’s really debatable whether the Linux kernel is really any more secure than the Windows NT kernel. Linux advocates have pushed the “many eyes, shallow bugs” line for a long time, but high profile lapses seem to really have put the lie to that.

There’s a technique called “heel-toe” shifting which involves using different parts of the right foot to operate the brake and throttle at the same time, while the left foot works the clutch.

If wasn’t full garbage collection in the spec. It was some infrastructure support in the spec that would make it easier to write garbage collectors in C++.

And Roe v. Wade increased access to abortion about the same time, together with the leaded gas.

Another aspect to this is that Android is Linux, but it is not GNU / Linux. This is true both in the literal sense of not using GNU coreutils or glibc, and also in the broader sense.

What I mean by the “broader” sense:

• no X or Wayland
• GTK or Qt support is something an application has to bring with them.
• filesystem is substantially reorganized
• users and system permissions setup substantially differently

To the application programmer Android / Linux looks like a completely different ball game.

That kid looks ready to raise your health insurance deductible again and deny your claim for insulin.

I think I’ve seen at least one that has returned to Pizza Hut after leaving the folks for a while.

Israel has already been fighting a war with Hezbollah that Hezbollah declared. These attacks were fairly specifically targeted at Hezbollah’s military equipment. They have been arguably successful at disrupting Hezbollah’s communications, and likely command and control systems. That by itself is a valid military objective.

To the extent that these attacks directly hurt Hezbollah personnel, and to the extent that they damaged Hezbollah’s morale: those too are valid military objectives.

So “war crime” gets thrown around here quite a bit just because there are high civilian casualties. The facts are twofold: Civilian casualties have always been a part of warfare; and there is no specific number or proportion that makes some act into a war crime. That’s just not how these kinds of laws are written.

I have not yet seen a strong argument for a specific war crime rooted in a specific basis in international law. A lot of people bring up protocols 1 and 2 to the Geneva conventions, but Israel and the US have not ratified those.

There are other conventions that regulate weapons of war, but I’m pretty sure none of them are going to address pager bombs directly. An argument there would have to be at least somewhat creative.

I thought they catch fire and burn down slowly.

Correct. Both the recent pager and radio attacks, and the 1996 cell phone attack, were performed by planting military explosives inside the devices in advance.

There is no magical way to hack the electronics to make a lithium battery straight up explode.

Also, Israel already assassinated someone by exploding their cell phone way back in 1996.

When I started on Debian, there was only apt-get. (And dpkg if you manually pulled .debs from somewhere).

Then a little while later, there was aptitude, which was nice.

apt the command didn’t show up until 2014.

Technically I think that’s still “put us first on the search bar” money. You’re giving the real under-the-table explanation.

The Geneva conventions do not contain the level of protection for civilians that you think.

In particular, Israel has ratified and is a party to the conventions of 1949. After much debate in 1949, those conventions ultimately allowed things like indiscriminate carpet bombing of cities (which the US practiced extensively in the previous war).

Later protocols from 1977 added more civilian protections more along the lines you propose. These protocols banned carpet bombing and introduced the concept of proportionate response into the conventions.

Israel and the United States have not ratified the 1977 protocols 1 and 2 concerning additional civilian protections. According to the text itself, they are not bound by the provisions if they do not agree.

Used to be, you could correlate the message timestamps with Fox News programming, and get a pretty good idea of what set him off.

Actually I think the world population is such that you need to add one or two bits.