In summary: Secure messaging wasn't pervasive at all, and the existing options were either overly technical, had a bad user experience or never made it out of beta. That's why Manuel wrote the first version of Threema for himself and his friends, and released it for iOS in December 2012. //

On the protocol side: In 2012, TLS was in a bit of a bad state. Mobile operating systems commonly offered no modern ciphersuites at all and were sometimes plagued with bad random number generators. (For example: Android 4.0.4 didn't even support TLS 1.1 yet.)

As two courts of appeals have now concluded, the federal contractor mandate is unprecedented and unlawful. It would allow the government to use its purchasing power to mandate individual health decisions for one-fifth of the nation’s workforce. This sort of policymaking decision must be made by Congress, not an agency that is unaccountable to the American public.

Now would be the time to negotiate an end, except Russia has unilaterally annexed four more Ukrainian oblasts. Even the “foreign policy realists” are belatedly coming to the conclusion that there are exactly three ways to end this war.

• Ukraine is forced to accede to Russia’s terms and give up its entire Black Sea coastline, and be reduced to a satrapy of Moscow;
• A truce line is established along the current line of contact, creating another “frozen conflict” and setting the stage for another Russian invasion in the future; or,
• Russia is driven out of Ukraine, possibly even Crimea, and NATO gives Ukraine security guarantees against any future Russian invasion.

Much of NATO is leaving toward option number three.

Earlier this week, the Brits announced they would transfer a single squadron, 14 tanks, of top-of-the-line Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine. These working with the 50 Bradleys receiving training at Grafenwoehr, Germany, would make a battalion task force that, if supported by artillery and properly handled, could break the developing stalemate.

Wrapped inside the “what next” question is how much capability does NATO want Ukraine to have? Does it want Ukraine dishing out payback on Russian cities in proportion to the criminal attacks on Ukrainian population centers the Russians are carrying out? I think Ukraine’s strikes against Russian strategic bomber bases using homegrown “kamikaze” drones have put some of the BigBrainThinkers® at State and the Pentagon off their feed as they are sensing that Ukraine is unwilling to play by the losing set of rules for losers trying to lose hatched by the McNamara Defense Department during Vietnam.

fsutil behavior query
fsutil behavior set

 disablelastaccess {1|0}    

Disables (1) or enables (0) updates to the Last Access Time stamp on each directory when directories are listed on an NTFS volume.

You must restart your computer for this parameter to take effect.

Our impatience with waiting—and our demand for efficiency—betray our mistaken beliefs about time. We think that time is a commodity, something to be spent and wasted and saved. But a Christian perspective on time begs us to see that time is first and foremost a gift, given to us by our Creator God.

From God’s good and generous hands we are given every moment called now.

As the Apostle James reminds in his letter, we’re not in control of time, not even able to reliably plan for tomorrow. “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time then vanishes,” (James 4:13, 14).

We learned this truth, of course, during our earliest pandemic days when normal life was overturned by the global crisis. Graduations were cancelled, weddings were postponed. Days blurred one into another, and tragically, people grew sick and died, reminding us that tomorrow is never a guarantee.

Where do we find hope in the midst of these sobering truths about time? James gives us a simple and yet profound answer. He says that God’s people must live in surrendered trust to his will—and his good time. Instead of presuming on tomorrow or next month or next year, we ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that,” (v. 15). This isn’t to say that planning is wrong, but it is to say that counting on time is a presumption we can’t exercise. It is to say that alone we must learn the ancient monastic wisdom of remembering that we die.

Living in time requires gratitude: for every gift of every new day. And it also requires humility: to recognize that only God can make sure and certain plans. This gives us a freedom to believe that our time is a gift received from God and rendered back to him in worship.

We won’t get everything done that we hope and plan, but that’s okay. Because God’s never in a hurry—and never out of time.

In 2011, another meltdown happened in Fukushima, mere months after the extension decision had been made. This caused large anti-nuclear power demonstrations across the country, the CDU to lose power in the state of Baden-Württemberg – a state which had been governed by the CDU since the 1950's – and the Green party to end up ahead of the SPD in that state, leading to the first Green minister president and Green-led state government (although other issues specific to Baden-Württemberg also influenced the state election in favour of the Greens). The Baden-Württemberg election was a mere two weeks after the Fukushima incident.

Merkel's government attempted to meet public sentiment by walking back on the decision to extend nuclear power phase-out deadlines, and in the summer of 2011 the Bundestag voted with 513 out of 600 votes to increase the phase-out speed. The vote was by name (meaning every member of parliament went on record with their aye, no or abstention) and if I recall correctly it was also declared a decision of conscience rather than subject to party discipline. Anti-nuclear power sentiment in the general public was at its highest.

There has essentially been no further attempt to revise the legal situation. Opinion polls have, as far as I am aware, consistently recorded a clear majority against using nuclear power to generate electricity. Except for the AfD, no party in parliament currently supports extending nuclear power use or building new plants.

The top-rated program was 2022’s overall leader in cable news, “The Five.” That panel show logged 3,469,000 viewers, in line with its average figures. What is the standout statistic is this: That audience figure for the one-hour broadcast surpasses all of CNN’s primetime lineup! Beginning at 5 p.m., with “The Lead,” all the way through the 11pm hour with “CNN Tonight,” the combined audience of those shows did not total as much as Fox drew – for just the 5 p.m. hour. //

That is the viewership of seven CNN programs failing to draw as much as the lone show for Fox. It is rather tough to even process that disparity between what are supposed to be broadcast rivals.