Many Ethiopian cross-country runners were not able to participate in the recent World Cross Country Running championships in Tallahassee Florida due to rejected visas.
The USA is also supposed to host the World Track & Field Championships for under-20 in Eugene Oregon this summer.
A record 80,000 phones were stolen in the city last year [inferred to be 2024], according to the police, giving London an undesirable reputation as a European capital for the crime.
Overall crime in London has fallen in recent years, but phone theft is disproportionately high, representing about 70 percent of thefts last year. And it has risen sharply: The 80,000 phone thefts last year were a stark increase from the 64,000 in 2023, the police told a parliamentary committee in June.
That is partly because this crime is both “very lucrative” and “lower risk” than car theft or drug dealing, Cmdr. Andrew Featherstone, the police officer leading the effort to tackle phone theft, told a news conference. Thieves can make up to £300 (about $400) per device — more than triple the national minimum wage for a day’s work.
And they know they are unlikely to be caught. Police data shows about 106,000 phones were reported stolen in London from March 2024 to February 2025. Only 495 people were charged or were given a police caution, meaning they admitted to an offense.
There was a phone theft wave that peaked in 2024. It’s still happening, but it’s significantly less of a problem now - some stats say 30% down from the peak by mid 2025. I had my phone stolen in 2024, I know others who did, but I haven’t heard of anyone having theirs stolen recently and people aren’t really worrying about it any more.
Turns out it wasn’t just random street crime. It was being run by organised crime networks, and it went down significantly after they managed to disrupt a few major rings.
These waves do happen from time to time when criminal networks discover a new tactic, before the police figure out an effective method to deal with it. It was youth stabbings a few years ago and acid attacks before that, both are much reduced now.
Those criminals will move onto something else now, undoubtedly. Perhaps shoplifting, which it’s now reported is being also increasingly run by gangs. Point is, you can’t necessarily look at an individual type of crime as an indicator of criminality as a whole, could just be exploiting an opportunity.
Something that does upset me is that only the monetary value of a phone is ultimately considered in sentencing but these days a phone is a lot more, it is a lifeline to the rest of the world often having your ability to pay and travel built in. A theft of a phone can make a bad day very long and very difficult.
- In May 1990, Windows 3.0 running on a Intel 80386 could run multiple DOS VMs simultaneously
- In April 1992, OS/2 2.0 finally supported multiple DOS VMs. OS/2 1.x supported running only one DOS app at a time.
While MS Excel had been available on Windows for many years before Win3.0, Word for Windows had only been released a year before Win3.0.
So many PC users would still have been using the DOS version of WordPerfect (and maybe the DOS version of Lotus 123). Windows 3.0 allowed the user to run many of their DOS apps at the same time, which DOS and OS/2 couldn't do.
Windows/386 could do that in 1987, but not many people bought it. Power users had DESQview/386 or something similar.
If IBM had listened to Microsoft, OS/2 1.0 could have done that in 1987 too... and then I think OS/2 could have been a hit and Windows 3.0 might never have happened.
One major hire that you rarely hear about is when Microsoft hired an outsider (formerly at at IBM and Boeing) to take over as President and Chief Operating Officer.
Anytime that a coder modifies a function, the safe/unsafe-ness of the function will have to be audited.
People complain about comments getting out of sync with the code - seems like the same thing will occur with safe/unsafe comments attached to functions unless the developers are diligent enough to verify nothing has changed on any PR.
My other quibble from the article concerns:
...It requires going through the AST. And since the static analysis is mostly statically scoped, it doesn’t require heavy cross-file analysis. It can be single-file based, very limited scope.
The large C++ codebases I've seen have not been diligent wrt object ownership. Objects may get accessed in different files - not saying this is correct, just that it happens. Objects can be accessed/modified by other non-owning objects in inconsistent ways which lead to inconsistent behaviour especially when errors occur.
The most impressive C++ static analyzer I've seen is Intrinsa's PREfix product, bought by Microsoft back in the 1990s. They parsed the C++ code using a purchased C++ frontend parser (can't recall the company name, but there are only a handful of companies that sell this stuff) and stored the data references in a database. Then they'd do dataflow analysis of the codebase looking for bugs.
They came out with PREfast which does simpler realtime static analysis (more like lint really) and VC contains a version of this. I think the MS DDK also includes a static code analyzer based on this.
But considering the effort put into guiding the AI versus rolling your own code in your spare time and having to reload the context for your static analyzer while dumping out work-related information, we're taking baby steps into a new age/paradigm for software development.
Just think if this article had been posted five or ten years ago. The technology isn't perfect and it has a long ways to go. Let's hope we don't go down too many wrong paths.
One of the touted advantages when Microsoft introduced the Office product suite was the integration and consistency of the apps. Whether you opened Word, Excel or Powerpoint, when the user wanted to quit the app, they'd use the same command - they didn't need to realize that the Quit command at a certain location in one menu had the same functionality as the Exit menu that was positioned in another location in another menu in another app.
Same name, same menu location, same shortcut key.
Much easier to train yourself or your employees - learn one app and you'd be familiar with the other apps in the Microsoft Office product line.
Other companies that tried to create Office-like suites didn't/couldn't create the consistency amongst the apps since they had to acquire the missing apps from other software makers to complete their own Office-like suite.
But this consistency was tempered by common sense.
The goal of shortcut keys was to make common actions quickly accessible to users. But for consistency, the same shortcut key should be used across apps.
When Mail/Outlook was introduced, users found that CTRL-F was bound to the Find command. Makes sense on first thought. But what's the most common command in an email app - is it "Find" or is it "Forward email". Especially when the prevailing standard for CTRL-F in email apps was CTRL-F.
When Bill Gates angrily complains that he's always invoking the Find command by mistake, Program Managers are willing to make exceptions to dogma.
It'd be interesting to compare the menus in Apple's iWork suite (Pages / Numbers / Keynote) to see if their menu items /shortcut keys are consistent or unique.
Note that this Microsoft Office suite consistency didn't necessarily extend to other Microsoft apps. There's no one managing menu item consistency company-wide at Microsoft, just within Office.
Look at where it came from. Excel was a Macintosh app. By 1989, Microsoft had designed one or two Mac applications to blend seamlessly with MacPaint, MacWrite, and MacDraw. (MacProject became MS Project IIRC.) Word on Mac was a native GUI while Word remained DOS based and Word for Windows was still launched from DOS by typing WINWORD.EXE.
Apple Human Interface Guidelines were foundational to Win 3.1. At the same time, doing UI on Unix I was always asked to solve problems by “doing it the Apple Way.” My secret was the MITRE Corp UI book which surveyed best practices from all platforms and underlined the reasoning.
While researching it [colon cancer], I came across a new study showing that exercise extends life for people diagnosed with that condition.
...researchers recruited 889 patients from 55 different health centers in six countries. All had undergone surgery and chemotherapy between 2009 and 2024; half were randomized into a three-year partly supervised exercise program. Those who got the exercise program were 37 percent less likely to die during the study’s follow-up period and 28 percent less likely to have a recurrence of colon or other cancer.
For the first year, the patients had supervised exercise and “behavioral support” sessions with their exercise coaches every two weeks. For the second and third years, it was once a month. They were free to choose any form of aerobic exercise they wanted, with the goal of increasing their weekly activity by about 10 MET-hours per week, which corresponds to about 2.5 hours of brisk walking. Most of the participants ended up choosing walking as their activity of choice.
All of this makes a convincing case that exercise should be an important treatment option available to cancer patients. As Booth and his colleagues point out, the magnitude of the benefit seen here is comparable to what you get from new cancer drugs that cost $100,000 to $200,000 per year. The exercise program provided in the study, in contrast, typically costs around $3,000 for the entire three-year period.
see https://fitnessvolt.com/rhonda-patrick-and-darren-candow-cre... and https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/creatine
Not much research in this area and I don't see anyway that a smartwatch can/could track this.
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