magduf

No, the point of this paper is that masks are not completely, absolutely, perfectly, 100% effective and foolproof, and therefore we shouldn't use them at all.

I really have to wonder if the people pushing this have some kind of agenda.

Correlation doesn't guarantee causation, but the Asian countries where mask-wearing has been commonplace for a long time have done far, far, far better with this pandemic than nations where no one wears masks in public.

This is the key here, and what all these "masks don't work!" people seem to constantly miss somehow. No, masks are not 100% effective at filtration; any idiot can see that. They don't have to be 100% effective, they just need to be better than nothing, and that'll slow the spread of the disease. Keeping people from spewing germs 20 feet when they sneeze or cough is a big help in slowing this pandemic.

There's a reason masks have been commonplace in Asia for many years now: they're meant to protect society, not the wearer. When someone thinks they're sick in Japan, they're supposed to wear a mask to keep everyone else from getting sick: it's good manners. It only works when lots of people are doing the same thing.

Similarly, the cloth masks are actually called "surgical masks", because they're normally used in surgery. They have absolutely nothing to do with keeping the surgeon safe from the patient; they're in place to keep the patient, who has a huge gaping wound in his body, from being infected by droplets from the surgeon as the surgeon bends over the wound site, and is breathing and talking to other people.

Why can't we have both?

I've read that SSDs can't be used to replace HDDs for long-term archival use: if you leave them powered off for too long, the data degrades. I can store data long-term on a regular HDD and stick in a closet or safe-deposit box and then get it out after a few years, plug it in, and read it just fine.

The WD product manager's response: "Bwahahaha!!! Seagate's drives are crap too, and we own Hitachi! Where are you going to go now? Bwahahahaha!"

I usually have pretty good success hitting F5 to reload and then hitting Esc at just the right time before the ad stuff loads.

>while The Troubles didn't induce the UK to give any concessions it wasn't already willing to give beforehand.

If you look farther back in Ireland's history, it seems like Ireland's independence from UK was achieved mostly by violent resistance. After there was too much violence, England finally decided it wasn't worth it, and came up with an agreement allowing most of the island to become independent, with the exception of a handful of northern counties.

What exactly are nutjobs going to do with any of these weapons?

We've had cases of nutjobs getting their hands on tanks, or building their own armored bulldozers, and going on rampages. It's a pain, but it's not a complete disaster. These vehicles aren't invincible. They generally get stuck somewhere, and then the police break open the hatch and shoot the nutjob. Tanks really can't do much by themselves besides drive around and run into some things (or over them, but again, you have to be careful or it can get stuck, break a tread, etc.). Tanks armed with 120mm cannon rounds, of course, can do some serious damage, but private individuals aren't allowed to own that kind of weaponry at all.

It's the same with an older fighter jet. What are you going to do with it? Fly it into a building? Sure, that'll be worse than flying a Cessna into a building, but still, it's not like a WMD. Even if you could fully load the 20mm cannon, you're not going to do that much damage; they don't hold that much ammo anyway (only enough for something like 5-10 seconds of sustained fire I think). Yeah, being able to drop a bunch of 500lb bombs would be a disaster, but again, you can't get that stuff.

Yes, if Elon or Jeff wanted a nuclear-armed ICBM, the government would certainly stop them. Building a rocket is one thing, building a nuclear warhead is something else entirely, and is not something trivial that just anyone can do. Iran (an actual nation-state) has been trying for some time and still hasn't succeeded as far as we know. It takes a lot of facilities and special materials to build something like that.

Sounds to me like the military is simply shooting itself in the food with its "up or out" policies. Why force highly-trained and experienced people to leave just because they've gotten to a plateau in their career where they're both competent and comfortable?

Do foreign militaries also have these policies?

That probably doesn't matter to the people pushing the NDA. Why should they care about the realities of contract law, when they can just make up lies and get people to believe them under threat of lawsuit?

It's just like how so many car dealerships will tell you that getting your car serviced anywhere else will "void your warranty" even though that's blatantly illegal.

Because the volumes are low. It's the same with any technology. High volumes = low cost, and vice-versa. When the manufacturing is geared up to produce enormous volumes and there's a bunch of competitors, the final product cost will be very low. When there's only one manufacturer and it's a niche product and there's very low demand, the cost is very high.

Well it's pretty obvious that China is vying for the position, and the likeliest to achieve it.

I guess we can look forward to Chinese hegemony in the future, since the US doesn't want to do it any more.

When has any organization put peoples' lives over politics?

Anyway, the WHO/Taiwan debacle seems to resulted in Taiwan handling this pandemic better than anyone else, considering their proximity to China and the huge amount of trade and travel between them. Taiwan just ignored the WHO and did their own thing, which was the best thing.