blywi

XOR A absolutely works on Z80 and it's of course faster and shorter than loading a zero value with LD A,0. LD A,0 is encoded to 2 bytes while XOR A is encoded as a single opcode. XOR A has the additional benefit to also clear all the flags to 0. Sub A will clear the accumulator, but it will always set the N flag on Z80.

I think the answer is in the article text "all meticulously sectioned by publisher". Book sizes differ somewhat between publishers, but each publisher tends to only print books in a few standard sizes. For the paperback editions this is even more reduced, it usually looks to me like all paperbacks from one publisher are the same size.

I always thought it to be the other way around. If you assume that we are living in a simulation, then gravity might well be an artifact of a simulation that runs on localized, loosely coupled nodes. Because when you have mostly empty space, with low interaction, then the simulation is able to run at full speed, but the more particles you have interacting at close range, the slower the simulation gets as the local workload increases. In this model the force called gravity would not be the source, and time dilation one of it's effects, but instead time dilation caused by interactions is the cause and the gravitational force is what we experience as the result.

The same thing happened a week ago in Hamburg/Germany when the fire department wanted to inform the local population about necessary evacuations for removal of World War II unexploded ordnance that were found during construction work. They had hit their Twitter limit and were unable to post the notice.

In German: https://www.rnd.de/medien/twitter-zugriffslimit-feuerwehr-ha...

I just ran into the same issue yesterday when I was updating one of my machines. Furtunately I caught the DKMS error when mkinitcpio ran after the upgrade:

  ==> dkms install --no-depmod zfs/2.1.9 -k 6.2.8-arch1-1
  Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 6.2.8-arch1-1 (x86_64)
  Consult /var/lib/dkms/zfs/2.1.9/build/make.log for more information.
  ==> WARNING: `dkms install --no-depmod zfs/2.1.9 -k 6.2.8-arch1-1' exited 10

Issues like these are when being on a rolling-release distro might bite you.

To mitigate the risk a bit, I always have the linux-lts kernel package installed on all of my Arch Linux machines, which provides a fallback option when the mainline kernel fails, or some major kernel issue surfaces. In my case with the LTS kernel at 6.1.21-1-lts, DKMS build of ZFS on LTS succeeded, so it would have been a fallback option to boot even if I would have missed the error for the mainline kernel DKMS.

  ==> dkms install --no-depmod zfs/2.1.9 -k 6.1.21-1-lts
  ==> depmod 6.1.21-1-lts

I don't have my root on ZFS, I only use it for data storage, but if I ever did,I would make damn sure to build myself a live ISO with ZFS support and all drivers necessary for network access, ahead of time, in case I need to do an emergency repair. It doesn't need to always be on the latest kernel, just recent enough that you are able to mount all partitions and to chroot into the system.

For this issue a workaround with Kernel 6.2.8 is discussed in the AUR comments for zfs-dkms: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/zfs-dkms This would involve editing the PKGBUILD for ZFS to patch the license for the symbols to GPL, though I'm not sure about the legality of this approach.

I would argue that the credit of first 3D open-world game belongs firmly to Mercenary from 1985, and not to Hunter with it's 1991 release date.

Mercenary is a 3D vector environment where one can navigate the environment freely, on foot or by using different vehicles and aircraft, enter buildings and explore their interior. The graphics is much more limited than Hunter with the first Mercenary game from 1985 only using simple wire-frame graphics, you can most of the time just walk through.

Even with the technical limitations of it's time this game proved really captivating, once you made it past the initial hurdle of figuring out what the hell you're supposed to do in this game, after crash-landing on an alien planet in the introduction.

It was one of the few games that really fascinated me back then, and I spent many hours playing it.

There's a good introduction and walk-through of the game and it's sequels on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWTAEd0Z9uI

The best exploration of this theme that I have read, was an East German SF novel from the former GDR. Unfortunately, as far as I know, it has never been translated into English.

Here is a very short synopsis on the authors website in English: https://steinmuller.de/en/sf-literatur/science-fiction-buech...

There's more to the story than that.

The last German government before Merkel came to power, was a coalition between the Green party and the Social-Democrats (SPD), this government decided to phase-out nuclear power in Germany in favor of renewable energy by limiting the running time of existing nuclear power plants.

The next German government was a coalition between conservative CDU under Merkel and SPD, and the nuclear phase-out remained untouched.

But when Merkel won the federal elections a second time and was able to form a coalition with the Liberal-Democrats (FDP) replacing of the SPD as a coalition partner, who had voted in favor of the nuclear phase-out, they decided to cancel the nuclear phase-out.

This happened in the autumn of 2010 and was a controversial decision for the public opinion. When Fukushima happened half year later it was widely seen as a confirmation of the inherent risks of nuclear energy and thus the Green party’s energy politics, not because Germany is especially prone to Tsunamis, but because it showed that it's impossible to rule out and plan for every possible dangerous situation in advance, and that even a high-tech country like Japan, on a comparable technical level to Germany, was not able to stop the meltdowns.

Elections in federal states shortly after Fukushima resulted in a landslide loss for Merkel's CDU and big wins for the Green party, the CDU losing one of its stronghold states [1] it had before held constantly for 58 years.

As far as I remember Merkel foresaw the public reaction and almost immediately after Fukushima voiced out in favor of reversing the cancelation of the nuclear phase-out, but could only get a solid backing in her party, after the losses in the federal state elections.

[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/-fukushima-strahlt-bis-baden-wu...

It's also available on Vimeo

https://vimeo.com/305272247

Some other webcomics I remember from that time:

- CFRH or College Roomies from Hell, still ongoing although at a much slower pace: http://www.crfh.net/

- Sabrina Online, started 1996 by Eric W. Schwartz of Amiga fame: https://www.sabrina-online.com/

- General Protection Fault, like the name suggest, this one also has an IT setting: https://www.gpf-comics.com/

- Roomies! and It's Walky! - A teen romantic comedy: http://www.itswalky.com/

- Argon Zark, this was the first web comic I discovered, seems to be going back to 1995: https://www.zark.com/

If you would like to have more background information, here is a great thread about Chechen history and Kadirovs rise to power in view of this conflict. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1497612331953577991.html

I would recommend Kamil Galeev threads to anyone interested in the history of Russia and Ukraine, he has written a ton of threads about a lot of different aspects to the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, which all look very well researched to me. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions though.

Here is the meta thread for all the sub threads: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1498377757536968711

Unrolled twitter threads:

1. Why Russia will lose this war? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1497993363076915204.html

2. Information Warfare https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1498313116312080384.html

3. Kadyrov's kingdom https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1497612331953577991.html

4. "Ukrainian Nazism" - Putin's take https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1497306746330697738.html

5. How Putin came to power https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1496711906412933121.html

6. FSB: State Security as the core of Putin's regime https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1496506490202513413.html

7. Valentina Matvienko: a sociological portrait of Putin's elite https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1495790874235744258.html

8. Isn't Ukraine just a separatist Russian province? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1495469553136066572.html

9. Ukrainian Geography https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1495200579919958021.html

10. A crash introduction into ethnopolitical situation in Ukraine https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1494334415446577153.html

11. Russian demography https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1493602653586264076.html

12. Russian army https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1493968165717561346.html

13. Why Putin is afraid of Ukraine so much https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1492960693737463813.html

14. Russian assabiyahs https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1492549093771694082.html

15. The Horde and Russian Imperiogenesis https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1492164056962195457.html

16. Why honour matters - The War in Ukraine in American context https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1498692916511924232.html

17. Russian parliamentarism https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1499048492358111235.html

18. VDV: Why Russia lost this war https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1499377671855292423.html

19. Russian exports https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1499855858456567809.html

20. Dynamics of nuclear deterrence https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1500168838356381703.html

It looks like the proposed Covid-19 antibody find for Italy from 2019 is not uncontested among the science community, here is a comment from virologist Marion Koopmans [1], who was trying to validate the study's results:

"Yrs, we tried. Sofar have not been able to confirm. Serology in low prevalence situations is challenging so our criteria are stringent ( triple antigen positive and neutralisation). With that no positives pre march 2020 in our country and sofar not in panel from italy"

[1] https://twitter.com/MarionKoopmans/status/141665264260494541...

According to the Guardian article [1] they had already traced him down to Spain and only used Google Maps to confirm their leads.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/05/italian-mafia-...

Do you have source for that claim? I tried to find that recommendation, but all I came up with, was this fact check [1]. According to the fact check the CDC did NOT change cycle threshold, and the thresholds used to decide if test result is positive, are not different for vaccinated and unvaccinated. The quoted 28 cycle threshold is apparently only used for deciding if a sample can be submitted for sequencing.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jun/03/tweets/cdc...

Well apparently it is possible, and it has been done, probably more than once.

In his German language podcast Dr. Drosten, a Coronavirus specialist from Charite Berlin, is addressing this exact issue. In case you have never heard of him, his lab was the first to publish a working PCR test protocol for SARS-CoV-2 back in January 2020 [1]

Here is an DeepL translated excerpt from the transcript for his latest podcast [2]

"The whole thing has a certain complication. The Ct values that we have here are not easily comparable between the individual test manufacturers. Basically, you can say that a high Ct value always indicates a low viral load. And if the Ct value then becomes lower, then that also becomes a higher viral load. But we can only compare them numerically as long as we are in the same test system. The differences there are sometimes considerable. There are test manufacturers where a value of, let's say, 25 is nothing at all worrying, while the same value of 25 in another manufacturer's test shows that this is already a seriously infectious concentration. This is simply because these test manufacturers do not standardize on the Ct value. That would not make sense either. Instead, it makes sense to simply determine what lies behind the Ct values, namely the actual viral load. You can do that, you have to calibrate that."

and further

"We did that in the fall. All the laboratory work that is necessary for this was done in September and October. I had already explained that to the public in the summer, how that works. We worked in the lab to make this possible. We have also come so far that viral load standards... You really have to imagine it as a small plastic vial with a test solution in it. It contains killed virus of a known, defined concentration. You can order it in two or three defined concentrations from a company that sells such a thing. The purpose of this company is to provide quality assurance for laboratories and to offer the necessary calibration standards. And these calibration standards are produced here in our laboratory, this killed and exactly quantified virus. So we have produced this calibration standard. We have also developed instructions, which are then recommended by the Robert Koch Institute, on how the laboratories can use this calibration standard to convert their Ct values into viral load ranges, which either actually lead to an exact viral load or which - and this is our recommendation - lead to assessment ranges. And that is to an assessment of highly infectious, low infectious, and borderline. So roughly speaking, that is expressed a little bit more genteel and precise. There's even a recommendation on how to express that on the medical findings then. Medical laboratories can do all that. This is also done in practice in the hospital sector. routinely used for discharge decisions. For example, a patient is in the intensive care unit. He is getting better. He should be transferred to a normal ward. Now the question is: Can we do that? Is he still highly infectious? Then a quantitative PCR test is carried out with these findings."

[1] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E... [2] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript306.pdf

This WHO statement has been widely misinterpreted, is is not the case that PCR tests were resulting in inflated numbers of false positives, see Reuters fact check [1] from February 4, 2021, and [2] from April 8, 2021.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-who-instruction... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-who-pcr-idUSL1N2M1...

In this Twitter thread Immunologist Kristian G. Andersen is addressing similar claims about the Furin cleavage site and the use of CGG codons: https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507230848032772

According to Andersen, the CGG codon isn't quite as rare in coronaviruses. He also comments that the stability of the CGG codon in the Furin cleavage site has been remarkably high over the course of the pandemic, which is a hint that the CGG codon may be selected for and crucial for the virus.

Quoting him:

> Now, the codons. Here, Baltimore is talking about the two codons coding for the first two arginines (R) following the P - CGG. The CGG codon is rare in viruses because it's an example of an unmethylated "CpG" site that can be bound by TLR9, leading to immune cell activation.

> Despite being rare, however, CGG codons are found in all coronaviruses, albeit at low frequency. Specifically, of all arginine codons, CGG is used at these frequencies in these viruses:

> SARS: 5% SARS2: 3% SARSr: 2% ccCoVs: 4% HKU9: 7% FCoV: 2%

> Nothing unusual here.

> Furthermore, if we go back to the FCoV sequences and compare them to SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level you'll see that FCoV also uses CGG to code for R immediately following the P. The next R is CGA (non-CpG) in FCoV, while it's CGG in SARS-CoV-2 - one nucleotide difference.

> We see CGG multiple times in different ways - here's an example comparing another "PR" stretch between SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, and SARS-CoV in the N gene. Note how SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 both use CGG, while SARS-CoV-2 uses CGC for the first R, while later R's are coded by CGT or AGA

> One final point about the CGG codons in the FCS - if they were somehow "unnatural", we'd see SARS-CoV-2 evolve away from "CGG" during the ongoing pandemic. We have more than a million genomes to analyze, so what do we find if we look at synonymous mutations at the "CGG_CGG" site?

> Remarkably stable. Specifically, CGG is 99.87% conserved in the first codon and 99.84% conserved in the second.

> This is very strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 'prefers' CGG in these positions.

This is good summary of the intellectual property situation for mRNA vaccine. The link was posted 2 weeks ago on the Twitter stream of Katalin Kariko, pioneer of mRNA vaccine technology and VP at BioNTech.

https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/04/11/mrna-ip-competitive-la...

https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/04/21/mrna-ip-competitive-la...

https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/04/30/mrna-patent-competitiv...

I had the exact same question. What I could find was this Reuters article [0] which lists nucleotides and special plastic containers as two of the items in short supply.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

Relevant twitter thread by Kai Kupferschmidt, a science journalist, whose top-notch coverage of COVID-19 related topics, I have come to appreciate during this pandemic. Key points: - This paper tells little about the AstraZeneca vaccine, which seems to have a much higher risk of CVST than the mRNA vaccines. Actual quote from press conference: "I think our data say actually nothing about the AZ vaccine." - The number of CVSTs for mRNA vaccines are surprising and very different from the ones presented by ACIP yesterday.

https://twitter.com/kakape/status/1382655684496523264

I was going to post the same link, as I also feel that this article is more nuanced.

There is also a twitter thread by one of the article's authors summarizing the article and discussing some additional information.

https://twitter.com/kakape/status/1372315648894844940

It seems more like the majority of borosilicate vials are produced outside of China. It doesn't even look like China has any significant domestic production capacity for the type of high quality chemically inert glass needed for vaccine vials, that's why the tubes for production are mostly imported.

Main producers of vials seem to be SCHOTT, Stevanato Group, Gerresheimer, Corning, and DWK Life Sciences, from Germany, Italy and the US.

SCHOTT alone is looking to increase production until the end of 2021 by about seven billion vials [1], which would be 3.5 times more in additional production output than the complete annual production capacity of Zhengchuan Pharmaceutical, which according to the article is one of China's largest producers.

[1] https://www.pharmtech.com/view/readying-glass-vials-for-vacc...

Not a biologist. But this interesting article [1] in Science Magazine, describes a possible route how SARS-CoV-2 may acquire multiple new mutations: Immunocompromised patients with long running infections. Two cases have been independently reported in the UK and US. The patients have been infected for a duration of 101 and 154 days respectively. In both patients the virus acquired multiple new mutations, both were eventually treated with antibodies, but have still died in the end. It looks like a weak immune response which is not sufficient to clear the virus, may help the virus by giving it the time needed to further adapt to it's human host.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/uk-variant-puts-spot...

RISC OS for Archimedes/RISC PC also inherited this feature, although, as far as I can remember, you could only use it in CLI mode (after pressing F12 key) and not in windowed mode. My guess would be that the RISC OS version for the Raspberry Pi still has the copy cursor, in that case you could argue that there are even recent systems available with it.

For me drag-and-drop is not complete without also being able to save by drag-and-drop. On RISC OS you can save your files by dragging the file icon to the place you want to save your file. This can be a directory window, or it could also be another app icon on the taskbar, or an open app window.

This way it is possible to create workflows where you have small specialized apps that complement each other. You would open a file by dragging it to the first app, edit it, drag the result to a 2nd app do some more editing, then drag the result to the next app and so on and save only the final result back to disk. This is basically supporting the Unix philosophy of having many small programs that do one thing well, and combining them to achieve the desired result.

Instead what we now mostly have on all platforms are huge monolithic programs that try to cram every possible feature into a single package. One reason for this, is in my opinion, that a workflow that is similar to the RISC OS way of dragging from app to app is just to cumbersome on systems without drag and drop between apps, as every step one has to go through the filing system, saving a file by browsing through a directory tree and browse the directory tree again when loading the file in the next app.

This Chinese paper compares the sensitivity of diagnosis with chest CT vs RT-PCR:

"In a series of 51 patients with chest CT and RT-PCR assay performed within 3 days, the sensitivity of CT for COVID-19 infection was 98% compared to RT-PCR sensitivity of 71% (p<.001)."

https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.2020200432

You are probably right that the numbers out of Hubei province are inflated and less severe cases are underrepresented. Unfortunately, according to some experts, the case fatality rate of ~2% seems to hold even for cases outside of China.

Statistical modeling of the case fatality rate using only cases and deaths reported from outside China was done by Christian L. Althaus (Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Bern), this estimates the CFR for COVID-19 at 2.1% although with a high uncertainty (95% confidence interval: 0.5%-5.4%). Data and R code for his modeling are available on Github: https://github.com/calthaus/ncov-cfr

A comment from Adam Kucharski (Associate Professor, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/122970801348691148...

"... The upshot: the widely quoted 2% fatality for China is calculated incorrectly, because it's based on data that is under-reported and doesn't account for delays. But, confusingly, these errors may actually cancel out, leading to an estimate that is right for the wrong reasons ..."

The tower has actually been in operation since September 1990. So the time needed for construction was just 2 years and not 16 years. For the first years it was operating as a simple drop tower, without a catapult. The catapult was added later in 2004. Construction costs according to German Wikipedia were more than 24 million DM (12.2 million euros), with a further 4.2 million euros for the catapult. They are doing on average about 400 drops per year. The time in micro-gravity is 4.74 sec for a simple drop and 9.3 sec with the catapult. (source: Wikipedia) According to my estimations this amounts to about 18.72 hours of micro-gravity in 24 years.

That's still expensive, but not outrageously so.