I don’t disagree but it seems to me it’s going crescendo, with de facto monopolies running the show and buying anything that could be an obstacle, be it other companies or policymakers.

That there are such wild variations in price between countries shows how little that subscription is correlated to any actual costs.

At best subscribers in richest countries are subsidizing poorer ones, but most probably, Google is just trying to maximize the amount of money they can extract from everyone’s pocket. The repeated seemingly random price hikes seem to confirm this hypothesis. It’s just the MBAs enforcing terminal stage capitalism and ruining everything that is good.

The article you linked to is about suppressyn, an originally viral protein that’s been integrated in human DNA and is as far as I know only expressed in placenta. There suppressyn helps fight viral infections by competing with some families of viruses for the binding of a membrane receptor (ASCT2) that these viruses use as a way to recognize and attach themselves to target cells.

It seems NCLDV infects unicellular algae and protists, with at least some of the family members relying on phagocytosis by the host, and many of them displaying fibrils on their particles. And though the binding mechanisms probably differ between different viruses of the NCLDV family, I really doubt these host organisms express ASCT2.

Nope, I looked at DNA length, that’s what the kb or Mb in my previous post is about. Kb stands for kilobases, each base or nucleotide being one of those A, T, C and G that constitute DNA. Biologists mesure the size of a genome by counting these bases. Average size for a virus is around 10,000 bases or 10kb (sources say 7-20kb) and they don’t get much smaller than 3.5kb.

Nope, sorry. That’s not how immunity works.

According to the paper this article is based on, the family of viruses they study, called NCLDV (for NucleoCytoplasmic Large DNA Viruses), are about 1 μm in diameter, which would indeed put them up there with the largest viruses like Pandoravirus or Pithovirus, which are also around the micrometer mark, and I believe are also part of the NCLDV phylum.

Those viruses are about the size of a bacterium. In fact they are so large that they weren’t immediately identified as viruses. Here’s something to give you a sense of the size of common viruses :

However, I don’t know how they come up with that 1500x factor (which doesn’t appear in the source paper), since in size, it’s more like 10x bigger than your average virus (~100nm). Even considering genome size, common viruses genomes are about 10 kb or so, wheras Pandoravirus is the biggest at 2.5Mb. So that would be closer to a 250x factor at best.

For reference, SARS-CoV2 (of COVID-19 fame) is about 100nm in diameter and has a genome size of 30kb.

Mais je t’en prie :)

I don’t disagree, i’m simply trying to present a somewhat less extreme (and therefore i think more appealing) version of your argument

It supposedly comes from originaly counting in base 20 ( a.k.a : vigesimal system) in some proto-european language. There are traces of it in breton, albanese, basque and danish for example. Even in english, there is a reminiscence of vigesimal, in the “score”, see for example Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which famously starts with : “Fourscore and seven years ago…”, meaning 87 years ago.

It supposedly comes from originaly counting in base 20 ( a.k.a : vigesimal system) in some proto-european language. There are traces of it in breton, albanese, basque and danish for example. Even in english, there is a reminiscence of vigesimal, in the “score”, see for example Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address “Fourscore and seven years ago…” means 87 years ago.

You don’t even have to rig a bomb, a better analogy to the sensor spoofing would be to just shine a sufficiently bright light in the driver’s eyes from the opposite side of the road. Things will go sideways real quick.

There’s a typo in the title. If you go back to the original source (in french), they actually retain 79,5 % of their original efficiency, so even better than the article’s title would have you believe.

That’s how you land on my wishlist !

I guess this guy never heard about Popper and the paradox of tolerance :

If a society’s practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them.

Oh I agree with you, but I wanted to alude to what’s going on in other parts of the world as well, where it’s not at the outright fascist stage. Yet. (I also called it dictatorial, so…)

There’s really not much hope for humanity. Everywhere people are falling again and again for slightly different flavors of populist conservative corrupt assholes with a dictatorial liking. Like it’s ever done the world any good before.

It’s mandatory to display the price per kg or L in France, which makes comparing the value much easier.

This proposal is bonkers. Imagine aaaall the nudes that will have to be manually assessed by police (until they outsource it because it’s cheaper), and then you have to believe they won’t keep anything and that there are zero bad apples.

Besides, if the tools are already in place in the apps, it’s only a question of time before the detection system is repurposed for censorship of anything a totalitarian leaning government doesn’t like. Memes about our dear leader? I’m afraid we can’t allow that !

You can’t have a backdoor that works for the good guys only.

I understand the sentiment, although I still do have sympathy for them. The thing is, everyone knows by now that any westerner will likely be arrested by the Iranians on bogus pretext, and then used as a bargaining chip to alleviate some of the international sanctions. In the meantime, you’re pretty much guaranteed to spend a couple years in prison, and probably be raped too if you’re a woman.

Jeebus ! The number of people commenting here who don’t have any knowledge of the situation is annoying.

France vowed in the Noumea Accord of 1998 to gradually give more political power to New Caledonia. Since, under the agreement, New Caledonia has held three referendums over its ties with France, ALL rejecting independence. Now, the last referendum in 2021 had something like 94% people voting to stay French BUT the independentists had called for a boycott of the referendum, and so turnout was only about 44%. In 2018, New Caledonians rejected independence at 57%. In 2020 it was 53%. In both these votes, the turnout was 80+% .

So this is not a case of France imposing control on the local population, there seems to be at least a small majority of people who wish to stay French.

New Caledonians have French nationality, they vote in all french national elections (presidential, parliament, etc. ) and could absolutely vote in local elections if they moved to say Paris or Marseille.

The thing is, the electoral lists in New Caledonia were frozen in 1998, and so anyone who came to live there legally after that still can’t vote in local elections. This is now being reversed, allowing citizens who have lived there for at least 10 years to vote, and that’s why the independentist party is rioting. They fear the independentist vote would be diluted by these newcomers, which presumably would vote to stay French.

Edit : To add some context on the independentists, they are mostly of the Kanak people, the aboriginal population of the islands. Today, they represent about 41% of the ~300k people living in New Caledonia.They are usually poorer and benefit from a lesser level of education than Neocaledonians of European or mixed descent.