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.

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

122.75 is assigned for air-to-air communications.

In some ways that’s good: you don’t want someone shouting about “YOU’RE ON GUARD”. On the other hand, in this situation you want to choose a frequency that your target is actually monitoring, and guard may fit that bill better.

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.

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.

Some research earlier today suggested that some specific model may even have alkaline batteries, which are less thermal runaway-ey than lithium ions.

I’m just seriously impressed that someone could get enough explosive into the package and still have a functional pager that didn’t set off alarms.

Fracking has granted the United States independence from OPEC, and turned the US into the largest exporter of oil. The US now has the pricing power on the world oil market. This has huge geopolitical implications.

Back in the 2000s it was completely different. All of the geopolitical wonks were pushing renewable energy as a means of OPEC independence. And now that independence has been granted, but we still have the oil.

Meanwhile, as others have stated on this thread, the immediate problems from fracking have been mostly fixed, including the earthquakes. Long term, I don’t think anyone knows what’s going to happen with all of that dirty wastewater going back into the ground.

So on balance, there’s a good reason for the leadership in both parties to be on board with fracking: oil still rules the world, and fracking lets the United States rule the oil markets.

Now known as Cavazos. The country decided to maybe not name bases after traitorous losers.

None of the current ICBM platforms were designed for missile defense. Missile defense simply did not exist at the time.

Sentinel is busting its budget because it’s renovating and rebuilding all of the ground segments: all of those decrepit silos and computer systems. It’s still money well spent in my opinion.

Missile guidance is not a computationally hard problem, and it hasn’t changed much since the 50s. Terminal missile defense is a fantastically hard problem, and wasn’t mastered until the last decade or two. And the current generation missile defense capabilities still haven’t all been demonstrated in combat.

Having said that, I would generally expect NATO’s missiles to work as advertised in a hot war. And I would plan for Russia’s missiles to be somewhat less effective than they advertise, but still a credible threat.

I’m just repeating what happened or what the plan was the last couple of go arounds, with Napoleon and Hitler.

Napoleon did occupy Moscow, but it didn’t help him very much.

Hitler was turned back just short of Moscow, but the Russian government had all sorts of continuity plans that involved moving further east. Entire factories were uprooted and shipped into the Urals.

1. Even with nuclear annihilation, NATO could still get to Moscow in a three day operation. It’s just a question of which cities back home are still standing.

2. Moscow is not the big prize you might think it is. Russia can just retreat hundreds of kilometers further east and carry on.

3. NATO can do the thunder run, but they are not equipped to win a massive land war in Asia. You really gotta listen to the Sicilian from Princess Bride on this one.

—BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—

Side effects include all of your contacts calling you freakin nerd.

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No. I would like to go back to beans, please.

But the floppy diskette and the “hard disks” did in fact have circular discs inside that spin around.

I suspect that the word diskette was created as an analog to tape “cassette”. With both diskette and cassette, the media is stored inside an enclosure, and you don’t have to take it out manually.

I sure hope you have some peer reviewed clinical studies to back up a controversial statement like that!

The Geneva conventions are not monolithic documents, and they are not completely uncontroversial. I believe the article 51 you refer to is in a 1978 addon protocol that Israel has not ratified. For reference, there is a different article 51 in the original 1949 conventions, that talks about when an occupying army may conscript civilian labor.

Like any other international treaties, the conventions only apply to countries that have signed on and ratified the treaties. The United States and Israel have not ratified the additional protocol, so from their perspective they are not bound by the text.

The original 1949 conventions do have protections for civilians, but they are weaker protections. Ratiometric evidence of civilian casualties is heartbreaking, but unfortunately simply not relevant to the 1949 conventions. Under those rules, if a facility is used by your enemy to harm you, you can attack that facility. Period.

IDF is always careful to portray how they scrupulously follow the 1949 conventions when they speak to the media. Clear violations that become public are referred to investigation.

As in any war, some elements of IDF are almost certainly violating the conventions. But as a USian I don’t think I’ll get close to understanding the truth any time soon. I basically don’t trust any news source coming out of that region any more.

“Watermelon Man” by Herbie Hancock has a beer bottle solo credited to Bill Summers.