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We're going to start seeing royal descendants die off, like we're in an Agatha Christie novel.

Tiny D over there is basically methadone for people with a Trump habit.

Mistermack is talking the weather, not the climate.

You have to be careful what you wish for. The last person given three wishes wished that his dick would reach the floor, and his legs fell off.

I wish for an unlimited number of wishes. The other two are redundant.

It's a very peculiar sort of day when I agree with Rand Paul, but this seems to be one. The US congress won't have the guts to legislate much across-the-board limit on data gathering - we are, functionally, a plutocracy. And our personal information has become a huge commodity. I have no social media or google account (and block any record of searches), and use duckduckgo and protonmail for some activity, and keep no cookies, cache, passwords, etc, so surveillance isn't a personal worry. TikTok I've only ever guest-browsed. @John Cuthber posted article seems to give us fair warning. But it's not us who needs that warning, and the demographic that does is likely inclined to ignore such warnings. As it happens, I've heard the "I'm not that interesting" argument from one young TikTok user. Her position is "I don't care if China knows I bought six bottles of cranberry juice from a web store." Many her age don't realize there's the potential to know quite a bit more than just buying habits.

Paraphrasing it: If the application records your videos, photos, selfies, it can immediately knows who you are (e.g. it can search in an external database with faces e.g. Facebook, old Google+ or Twitter etc.) and your family and friends. USA-IT companies do/did it all the time ("automatic photo tagging") https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-drops-facial-recognition-tag-people-photos/ From 2010 to 2021 is 11 years.. Enough to gather their data even for external FB user. If the app shows things the user has clicked on, then after a while it knows which topics people are interested in (clicked) and which are not (skipped). If the application connects to the Internet then it knows your IP address, the less valuable/precise IPv4 and perhaps the more valuable/precise IPv6. Any application owner that connects to the Internet has server logs.. Public static IPs used by dedicated servers have well-know exact locations to within a few meters i.e. you go to McD, KFC, PizzaHut, and connect to their free open hotspot and (other) companies could know you're at the restaurant. If the app knows which WiFi SSID/ESSID you are connected to, it knows your almost exact location on the world map. Google is trying to fight it (so they are the only ones who know, which you can check in your Google Account). You can explore how this works for developers (they need to find a new workaround in newer versions of Android): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21391395/get-ssid-when-wifi-is-connected Older Androids let the app know the phone's IMEI, as well as the phone number. Newer versions return nulls. So companies have to force the user to give them the phone number, and then it is verified by SMS.. 2FA even gave them a good excuse to do it all day. When I started writing scripts in Python in March, Google started showing ads like "40k per month salary in your city" and similar ads with jobs.. Should we ban Google? I haven't seen any report clearly (to the developer) showing evidence of malfunctioning apps from TikTok, Huawei or any other Chinese company's app where they downloaded more data than US companies IT.. Any application that executes code it just downloaded from the Internet can do bad things, but it won't be detected for a long as the target (the person being attacked) is identified and the special code is uploaded only for this person. It can take minutes, seconds, milliseconds for this code to be on the device.. and then it is wiped out by itself.. Malicious applications that have built-in malicious behavior are much easier to identify without any doubt. Developer can decode it and tell what code is doing or pass it through soapbox to see malicious behavior. An application that identifies person by person and has an auto-update function must have an infrastructure that allows their programmers-hackers to inject malicious code into only one exact person in the world..

I have to admit I didn't know what the video showed, I had seen the full episode about a year ago and I swear I thought it showed the idea of the object being sensationalized and then debunked. This is a common theme for these videos NASA's Unexplained Videos. Either I am simply misremembering or they intentionally edited this to advertise their channel and try and get people to buy the entire episode. I am sorry, I do not know what to say, I distinctly remember the build up and then the admission of how it was all hype and they explained in some detail why it was hype but this short video only shows the build up. I am genuinely at a loss, I watched parts of this video and even remember the way they slowly debunked the entire thing going into great detail about the rotation rates not being as fast as claimed and how the communications disruption was due to a software glitch and how this had resulted in the entire alien claims. I hope I am just remembering the entire video and mistakenly inserted bit of the whole video into this one accidentally from memory... either that or I have slipped a cog. I am embarrassed, I do not blame you guys for doubting my credibility, hell I doubt my credibility, I see no way forward on this at this time.

Makes me think of an inverted version of this - Pick any relevant measure or indicator of ongoing climate change and you can find (too) short periods when they go down rather than up (or for ice, up rather than down... whilst the overall trend, as predicted, remains. Still the facile arguments that seek to interpret the downward temperature variability as trends but not count the upward variability at all continue - along with the willingness of people who should know better to believe that this is incompatible with sound global warming science. My own preferred measure of real change to the heat balance of our world now rarely goes more than a single year without hitting a new high - without showing any of that "warming has stopped" that Arctic sea ice is claimed to be showing -

I think the original argument was worse, as it appears that the claim was that the natural sciences had to be hundreds of years old to be valid. This is of course silly as modern methodologies and theoretical frameworks have shifted especially in the life sciences, with rather few concepts being several hundreds years old (but still heavily modified). But that all being said, climate science is actually fairly old though it was not a separate science. Mathematicians and physicists like Fourier and Tyndall looked at factors affecting Earth's temperature back then, for example. I think most environmentalists, activists, but also climate researchers would agree with you. There was economic argument that starting earlier would have been way cheaper, but we sat on our collective arses until things got really urgent. Generally speaking, politicians do not like big changes as they (similar to companies) dislike uncertainty. Up until it is certain to be bad, so they are forced to make some moves. It is a tragedy of commons all over, and denial seems to be one of the few ways to feel good about it. But not to sound too fatalistic, one could argue that some movement is better than no movement.

I beg to differ. The 'greenhouse gas' effect is well understood, and related to the characteristic black body re-radiation of heat fron the Earth at about 10o ( in the microwave range whre it causes bending/stretching of intermolecular bonds ), as opposed to incoming solar, centered at 4000o ( the visble range which mostly affects electron energy levels ). The absorption and re-emission of this microwavw radiation is upsetting the equilibrium ( because a lot of it can be re-directed back to the Earth, instead of into space ) and causing the Earth to retain more heat, and I'm sure someone has probably quantified this effect by now. This is a large simplification, but it is Physics, Chemistry and Math. So do keep in mind we are a science forum.

Facebook spent billions on Reels, which is short video format, and instead of pouring even more money into it, which appears to have worked with YouTube, Zuckerberg chose to spend that money lobbying and smearing the competition instead. One of my favorite TikTok stories is about a woman who'd lived with chronic illness for over a decade, and her doctors weren't sure what exactly was wrong with her, but had her on some expensive medications that only helped a bit. She joined TikTok for other reasons, but ended up posting videos about her daily struggles. Eventually she realized the app was pushing videos about Lyme disease from other creators, and she wondered why. When she watched their content, she recognized her own symptoms. She got a different doctor who confirmed the diagnosis and treated her successfully. The platform also challenges what Americans see and hear about themselves. This morning I watched a journalist from India talking about the US Department of State releasing the latest Human Rights Report, where the US evaluates every other country in the world so we can determine how much foreign aid to give them. We don't list ourselves, of course, since we aren't giving ourselves foreign aid, but we do judge others using criteria we ourselves would fail. US citizens are pretty blind to how much our rights are trampled on. This kind of looking in the mirror isn't very popular with conservatives, who think our children would feel bad about themselves if they knew half the appalling things we as a society have done in the past and continue to do today.

No worries. I've seen you struggling with the obvious before, so I'm happy to oblige.