[Ed P]

The Democrats through their CIA contacts obviously know some of the contents of the ‘Russia Report’, as why else should Hilary so publicly interfere in our elections. It follows then that the non-publication of the ‘Russia Report’ before our elections can only mean that it is damaging to the Conservatives or the Brexit cause. Having said that, I’m not convinced that revelations about Russian influences would have any real impact on pro-Brexit/Conservative voters.

[Ed P]

Although I think Outer Worlds is reasonably well optimised, it was the GPU and 3D renderer that maxed out the first. The Ryzen CPU was still pootling along on 16GB of ram despite having a vm in the background (thanks to all those cores me thinks)

[Ed P]

Drehza, I’d recommend going into settings and making sure you do not have BOTH local and cloud saves. They have/had a habit of getting out of sync causing data loss. I turned off Cloud saves as I could not see their point on a single player game.

[Ed P]

The recently announced Lib Dem/Green pact will influence election results as will tactical voting aimed at getting rid of Johnson. You can see the potential impact of this in your own constituency using the data on the bestforbritain.org site. It turned my deep blue constituency into marginal territory using the site’s assumptions. Mid Somerset could however see a complete turn-over.

My guess is that Conservative fears of the impact of this sort of voting resulted in Jo Swinson not being allowed to take party in the debate between party leaders.

Incidentally the linked tactical voting site must be in the running for the ‘most ugly site’ award.

[Ed P]

I found the first article very interesting in that it linked a magnesium deficiency to increased skin fatty acids, and I guess the ‘old person smell’. Perhaps a self test for incipient problems is that collars and cuffs get dirty more quickly!

“Intracellular magnesium deficiency may also cause an increase in intracellular sodium and calcium, which predisposes to arterial vasospasm, increased catecholamine release, increased fatty acids and lipids, as well as intravascular hypercoagulability.”

[Ed P]

While most people tolerate statins I do not, and started getting ‘peripheral nerve damage’. This is apparently not too common but I got. numb areas on fingers/toes and some associated nerve crosstalk e.g. touch being equated as pain. It probably was due to my switching to a fairly low fat diet.  Possibly too high a dose of statins stopped replenishment of the cholesterol that normally insulates nerve sheaths. I stopped taking statins and after a while everything went back to a healthy normal as did my cholesterol levels.

Cholesterol is a difficult subject to handle as it is an essential constituent of the brain and nerves. As in all bodily functions it is a question of balance, but many research areas are now pointing to the role of bad-breath caries bacteria in the gut getting swept into the blood stream and becoming a cause of plaque build-up in the arteries. Some think that is why sugar which feeds the bugs is bad for you, and why scourging materials such as non-digestible brans are good for you. Other dietary things which are apparently good are in the main fermented in some way and possibly have an anti-caries function. Incidentally statins also have an anti-bacterial function – link so don’t stop taking them unless they have unacceptable side-effects!

[Ed P]

I suspect it has naff all to do with statins, and more to do with such chairs being generally used by the elderly. It is probably associated with the ‘Old Person Smell’ phenomenon.  There is more on this link, but in essence body chemistry changes with age.

The more techy bit is in this extract from the link:

“As people age, fatty acid production in the skin increases while antioxidant production decreases. Polyunsaturated fatty acids are oxidized, sometimes increasing the amount of a chemical called 2-nonenal. Nonenal is an unsaturated aldehyde known for its grassy, greasy scent. Some researchers did not detect 2-nonenal; however, they did find higher levels of the funky organics nonanal, dimethylsulfone, and benzothiazole in the body odor of older subjects.”

I would guess that fatty acids are the faux leather guilty party.

Total aside, but ‘old person smell’ is a social no-no in Japan and as a result there is  a fairly large market for deodorants that mask these odours.

[Ed P]

Mark, it is unclear to me, but it may well be an old bug, at least I get that impression from reading the Ars comments.

I would say that your relatively old beta actually has the bug, as if you dig into the Mozilla bug reports they say it was in 71 and are talking about stomping on the bug in 72. I suggest you log into the comments on your beta account and see what they say.

[Ed P]

It has spread beyond Russia/Ukraine and is now in the wild.

 

[Ed P]

You perhaps saw my post before I added the 64bit info. In fact I was wrong, we may have to wait for 70.0.2. or 71.x.x as the release notes for 70.0.1 are unclear to me.

In point of fact if you use Russian/Ukrainian sites and become infected you should disconnect from the internet before rebooting and relaunching Firefox then close the offending Tab otherwise the naggered page will reload. After this you may then connect to the Internet.

[edit] the Ars article Comments has more detail/advice.

[Ed P]

Update – Mozilla has hurriedly fixed the bug and tells users to update asap to 39.0.3 (70.0.1 for 64bit) or in Linux to ESR 38.1.1 (tough if you have to wait for Mint’s normally slow response). In the unlikely event you get attacked by visiting Russian/Ukrainian sites then just do the usual shutdown/restart of your system.

Pi has its own problems too as the Android port has to be done first.

[Ed P]

Yet another Boeing quality issue emerges but this time closer to home. The pretty much all-Boeing airline RyanAir has had to take at least three planes out of service because of critical cracks in their wing roots. link

[Ed P]

When a company is staggering there is nothing like putting the boot in. A retired Quality Inspector revealed that he had asked the FAA to investigate safety complaints, but the FAA refused on the grounds that Boeing said they were already addressing problems. Beeb link.

However, some of his allegations are fairly horrifying and makes me wonder about some of the 737 crashes in the 1990s.

“He claims that under-pressure workers even fitted sub-standard parts from scrap bins to aircraft on the production line, in at least one case with the knowledge of a senior manager. He says this was done to save time, because “Boeing South Carolina is strictly driven by schedule and cost”.

[Ed P]

Just had my second crash in which the Epyx Cloud Save and local Saves got out of sync so I lost all my recent saves, including the current one! Not very clever on the part of Epyx. I might then have had a third crash except I caught a small alert saying ‘updating’. I suspect that the developers will be unfairly blamed for Epyx screw-ups if this carries on.

[Ed P]

Bob Williams wrote:

I can appreciate the reasons regarding security and encryption for business and military uses, but not for most of ordinary users.

Bob, you use encryption everyday on your PC – for example HTTPS encrypts your communications to your ISP, without it you would never dare to purchase anything on line.

Everyone would object like hell if a Government said that all door locks should be capable of being opened by a Government held key, as they needed to be able to pry about in people’s belongings.  If the security services had good reason backed by individual court orders then I would have no objection to such prying on my communications. However currently it is pretty much a blanket permission with even low-level council workers having a right to go on fishing trips for information. link

[Ed P]

We all liked living in New Zealand, the only real downsides were its distance from ageing parents, and regular earthquakes of 6+ or so. We regretted having to leave what Kiwis refer to as God’s Own.

[Ed P]

I’m with the developers on the Steam vs Epyx/others confrontation.

The cost of modern games is now up in the league of a fairly major movie development. The value-added by Steam did not warrant their fee for hosting and selling a single person game on a nearly risk-free basis. It certainly does not hold any comparison with retail margins as retail stores have to carry an inventory risk.

[Ed P]

I’ll spell it out again, just stop Firefox auto-updating using the simple method in my earlier link.

[Ed P]

Afraid that was not Windows but Firefox. Updates are always hell so why did you let anything update? link

The better Firefox method is via about:config  as there are stories that other methods sometimes fail.

The obvious downside is that you then need a regular updating schedule of your own.

[Ed P]

It looks as though a lot of purchasers are upset that SD card functionality has been removed by Lenovo link.

I’d guess that Government pressure is at the root of this. Probably it was an unholy alliance of Western and Chinese Governments bewailing that it would make it harder to spy on the populace.

[Author]

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