Android and Google Maps were both acquisitions, and Chrome was initially based on WebKit. I don't know when exactly Google started focusing on refinements, but I think it was before 2008.
That is not to say that nothing since then has been impressive, but I do think it's fair to call just about all of it incremental.
In August 2006, Google's then CEO Eric Schmidt joined Apple's board.
Andy Rubin, the founder of Android had already made a name for himself in mobile technology. In 1999, he co-founded Danger Inc. Microsoft bought Danger in 2008.
Google acquired Android in 2005, before the iPhone was unveiled in January 2007.
Chrome was based on WebKit, which was based on KHTML, the browser engine from KDE. The only reason we have WebKit as an open source engine is because Apple had to open source it. https://blogs.kde.org/2007/10/26/web-diplomacy/
They released "just" enough of it that WebKit could be replaced in Safari. That's it. Their patch would not compile or run on Linux. It would be _years_ before KDE had a WebKit browser. KDE took months to implement many changed from WebKit into KHTML.
Sequoia were freaking out. They had signed a term sheet with the Where2 team, and backed out because Yahoo! just released a map product. Yahoo was involved in both Google's early history and the events that led to Google Maps. Yahoo had an early opportunity to license Google's search technology, rather than acquire Google outright. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were introduced to Sequoia investor Michael Moritz through Yahoo co-founder David Filo.
Yahoo CEO Terry Semel reportedly offered around US$3 billion to buy Google, but Page and Brin declined.
Sequoia withdrew its proposed investment in Where 2 in 2008. Thinking Yahoo would dominate the market, and it was not a safe investment.
Sequoia then introduced Where 2 to Google. CIA, Keyhole, it's all a fun little rabbit hole :)
RuneScape is certainly far from the very worst of the internet, but it's still wise to be wary of Skinner boxes. Of course I don't follow that advice either.
> It is amusing to talk to actual border officials, because the term in their lingo for people running across from Mexico is usually simply "alien", which always makes me think of The X-Files theme tune.
Along similar lines, it makes me think of Men in Black.
Iran already wasn't working on nuclear weapons (a confident assessment by our intelligence community across the past 20+ years). The JCPOA then gave us the ability to verify that for ourselves. Then we (metaphorically) blew up that agreement, and (literally) blew up their leader who was firmly opposed to developing nuclear weapons, and the new one doesn't feel the same.
The JCPOA enrichment limits would have started to expire this year, and soon Iran could have completely legally enriched as much as it wanted - while getting hundreds of billions via JCPOA sanctions removal. Given what it took to get Iran to this state under sanctions, it would have been impossible to force it to renew the limits or give up anything on nukes. We'd have ended up with Iranian control of Hormuz at the very least, likely of Gulf as well.
Perhaps that's an acceptable cost of avoiding higher gas prices right now - except Iran would have had the capacity to decide these at will. It's a fair choice, but best to be aware of the consequences.
You don't think Iran would have renegotiated to extend it further? If not, why would they even bother top follow the agreement in the first place? The legality of what they do has never been a consideration, they are a sovereign nation.
>You don't think Iran would have renegotiated to extend it further?
Why would Iran want to do it? Iran could absolutely control Hormuz* and get a nuke at will** under the deal. At that point it can avoid sanctions by threatening the Gulf. Or demand other concessions for allowing the Gulf to operate. That's what it tries to do now, but from a much weaker position compared to the deal timeline.
* Take the real life prewar Iranian missile and drone strength, assume Iran had an extra couple of hundreds of billions to pour into it, no import limits by the UN, a less restive populace, etc.
** Breakout timeline being a week at most at end of expiry timeline. Probably the only way to keep the Gulf independent at that scenario would have been nuclear deterrence.
>If not, why would they even bother to follow the agreement in the first place?
Because Iran wasn't anywhere strong enough at the time to risk a war, but the existence of the agreement and general developments would have predictably changed the power balance in its favor.
>The legality of what they do has never been a consideration
Well, if you decide something is legal, it's much tougher to change one's mind and stop it later.
Iran has long said they're not working on nuclear weapons. However, they have built a large stockpile of particles of rich uranium, which is something completely useless to have unless you're planning on building nuclear weapons. This stockpile was built under the previous leader, who you are trying to claim was opposed to developing them, and yet he knew. who you are trying to claim was opposed to developing them and yet he knew.
Iran didn't have nuclear weapons, however for years they were only a few weeks away from having them. They had all the hard parts in place to build one. There's a reason to think they had plenty of experts who could do it. So far as we know they never actually built one but they absolutely could and this was done under the previous leader.
> Iran has long said they're not working on nuclear weapons. However, they have built a large stockpile of particles of rich uranium, which is something completely useless to have unless you're planning on building nuclear weapons.
After the JCPOA the stockpile went to zero (esp. >5% enrichment):
The general assessment on Iran has long been that they aim to become a nuclear threshold state (have the ability to make nuclear weapons quickly (~1y timeline or less) should they need to), but not actually acquire nuclear weapons for themselves.
> And even that is something that the west clearly should not allow.
...which is why we (used to) have the JCPOA. Attacking Iran will have no effect if they can mine uranium domestically and build centrifuges themselves.
They said they weren't working on nukes, and our intelligence community released assessments which agreed.
The level of enrichment they've been doing is higher than they need for power generation but it also isn't nearly enough to make nukes. A more reasonable explanation (given the assessments they aren't working on nukes) is that they were being deliberately provocative.
> So far as we know they never actually built one but they absolutely could and this was done under the previous leader
Right, they could, and didn't. Why? It was only 7 years from the discovery of fission to a proof of concept in the form of the trinity test. Either you assume a level of incompetence entirely divorced from Iran's efficacy on the international stage, or you accept they weren't trying.
Enrichment % is very misleading. Natural is about 0.7%. 3.5% is halfway to 90%. The distance from 60% to 90% is tiny.
That's because the distance is calculated using the quantity of raw material that needs to be filtered and not the enrichment percent, the more pure, the less material needed, hence smaller distance to 90%.
>Right, they could, and didn't. Why?
Some people worked hard to ensure the latter would be very inadvisable for Iran. Being so close isn't a stable equilibrium though.
After the deal was broken by Trump and Biden was trying to restart it....
>2023 : An IAEA report on the Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant found that two cascades of IR-6 centrifuges were configured in a way "substantially different" from what Iran had previously declared. Iran claimed the difference was due to a human error.
>On 4 March(2023), Grossi met with Raisi and other top Iranian officials. Earlier, IAEA had detected uranium particles enriched up to 83.7% at Fordow. In the meantime, Iran gave assurances that it would reinstall monitoring equipment at sensitive locations.
I like that he had banned nukes in 2003 but for some reason, Iran covertly construction Fordow starting in 2006. I guess he was just not as Supreme of a leader as he thought he was, somehow all those people just decided to hollow out a mountain and install centrifuges there.
Iran has domestic uranium deposits. They design and build their own centrifuges, and had thousands of such centrifuges during the JCPOA. It's basically impossible to denuclearize them or prevent them from building a rudimentary reactor or bomb, and it has been that way for at least two decades.
Diplomacy was a proven path to prevent Iran from reaching for nuclear deterrence. The plan worked well for America and Iran, which is probably what motivated Likud to escalate the situation and force them both to pick sides.
Yes, democracy and trade are the proven paths for preventing conflicts. Just ask the Ukrainians how that is going for them, I am sure they are so glad that Germany was buying oil and gas from Russia.
>The controversial gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 (NS2) has become the symbol of Germany’s widely criticised energy and security policy, which sought to build political bridges through trade and at the same time supply companies with cheap fuels. However, it drove the country into a fatal dependence on Russian oil and gas. Years later, government documents from the 2010s and early 2020s reported by Süddeutsche Zeitung showed that former chancellor Angela Merkel sought to portray her government as neutral and lacking competence in regards to the "business project" Nord Stream 2 to the outside world and European partners, while supporting increased gas trade with Russia through several actions.
Conflict was not a preferable alternative for Ukraine, so if you're trying to relate this as a metaphor for America's posture then it's not a great example.
There was an attempted self-coup last time he was voted out. I think it's pretty reasonable to be extra reactive to anti-democratic tendencies from him.
It was really jut the people least agreeable to Twitter's new ownership. Whether you view like or dislike of Elon as toxic is more down to personal taste. I find the culture there perfectly pleasant.
As the author mentions in TFA, she's on the Arch staff as a package maintainer. I don't think there was a technical obstacle around the windows setup process.
I wonder. I sort of accidentally discovered that Rufus could edit my arm64 windows 11 install media without problem - adding a local account and bypassing the need for domain login (just as it does for amd64).
This isn't a new trick - just the regular approach to editing windows install media.
But that process still results in having Windows 11 installed on the computer. I don't think it's a stretch to assume someone on the Arch Linux staff has reasons for avoiding installing Windows which do not involve an inability to accomplish it.
It's perfectly reasonable to complain about things you aren't entitled to. My Surface brand laptop has similarly ad-hoc Linux driver support. I don't expect Microsoft to support it better, but I'm still annoyed they don't.
That whole argument is predicated on the false assumption that mice are accurate enough human analogs that you even can cure human disease with their help. There's a good reason why it's such a common comment to point out how "in mice" was omitted from a headline that otherwise sounds like a medical breakthrough.
This is true, but perhaps not for the reason you have in mind. The “failures” are exaggerated by shoddy experimental design—mainly trying to generalize from a single fully inbred strain of mouse. Most murine research is based on this one strain: C57BL/6. This is like conducting a clinical study with one seriously inbred human subject multiple times. Very poor generality even to other types of mice, let alone to humans.
I think it's terribly unfortunate that the the "in mice" meme ever took off. If overhyping science based on preliminary tests is bad, so too is the blanket dismissal of that research that overcorrects in the wrong direction.
We share enough mechanisms across genetics, proteins and even our immune systems and that research is capable of asking meaningful questions that matter to us, and frequently has paid off. That's not to justify the ethics of it but I think it's beyond question that research iN mIcE has been an important research platform for things like immunology and lead to nobel prizes. Research writ large is a vast cumulative program of small iterations that are, individually, of provisional significance, and the categorical dismissal of it as not producing instant one-shot cures is at least as bad a misunderstanding of science as overhyped articles are.
One important lessons in modern biology is that deeply understanding one species is more useful than roughly understanding many. Experiments done on cells in dishes must still be tested in animals, such as dogs, monkeys, and pigs, before being tested on humans. Unfortunately, skipping any of these steps is still difficult.
That is not to say that nothing since then has been impressive, but I do think it's fair to call just about all of it incremental.
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