(Context: the 2024 Parliament elections in India, for the constituency of Kollam. The numbers in brackets are lead, not change from last election. Source: Election Commission of India)

Preliminary results for the 2024 Indian General election suggest that the Bharatiya Janata Party is set to lose its absolute majority in the lower house of Parliament. However, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) it leads is projected to cross the halfway mark. The opposition INDIA alliance is projected to more than double its seat count, from 92 to around 200 seats.

I have about 500GB of data (photos, documents, videos etc.) that I have accumulated over the years. Currently, I keep them on my computer and rsync all additions / changes once a month or so to an external hard drive. Do I need to be worried about data loss (sectors going bad, bit rot, bit flip, whatever it is called)?

To clarify,

1. None of this is commercially important; I just don't want to get into a situation where I look up an old family photo or video twenty years down the line and it has got corrupted.

2. Both my computer and the external HD are HDDs. They are fairly cheap here (and very cheap if second hand). Buying SSDs or dedicated hardware would be expensive.

Following the last day of voting for the 2024 Indian Parliamentary elections, exit polls predicted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's National Democratic Alliance would retain its majority, winning 340 - 401 seats compared to 353 in 2019. The main opposition INDIA alliance was expected to win 109 - 169 seats, up from 91 in 2019. Three 'neutral' regional parties - the BRS, BJD and TMC, were expected to lose seats.

Compared to 2019, the NDA was expected to win West Bengal from the TMC, and to make inroads into south India, where it has historically been weak. In return, INDIA was expected to pick up seats in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Haryana and Bihar, and to wrest Telangana from the BRS.

The Supreme Court of India, in a case concerning the protection of the Great Indian Bustard, ruled that the right against climate change is a fundamental right. Fundamental rights are rights guaranteed by the constitution (such as the rights to equality and personal freedom) or 'interpreted' as such by the Supreme Court (so far, only the right to privacy). They apply to all Indian residents, rather than only citizens, and cannot be removed except by constitutional amendment. The court also set up an expert panel to monitor the protection of the bird, and urged governments to speed up expansion of solar power.

Hey bro, can I have some antibiotic resistance?

Sure bro, but remember that the heavy metal tolerance gene is a dependency.

Shit, I'm on python 2 but hmrA requires python 3.

Today's result: President wins

Image caption: Panel 1 - A few weeks ago - Putin as the Raiden Shogun promising to let the traveller (Prigozhin) leave Russia alive. Panel 2 - Yesterday - The Raiden Shogun attacking the traveller once they have stepped foot outside.

Due to increasing concerns over cyberattacks and malware, India's Defence Ministry has decided to replace Microsoft's OS with a locally made Ubuntu fork named Maya (meaning 'deception' in Sanskrit). Maya will have an interface similar to Windows to ease the transition, and an end-point detection and protection system called Chakravyuh. The three armed services are also expected to follow suit, with the Navy already having cleared the OS for deployment.

The Indian government has long had a policy to transfer all government systems to open-source software, with the Railways and the Bombay Stock Exchange having switched to Red Hat and educational institutions using distributions such as Debian-based BOSS and Ubuntu-based KITE.

Context: two people who developed extremely destructive weapons, were horrified by their use, and had biographical films made about them.

Jiro Horikoshi was a Japanese aviation engineer who designed the dreaded Mitsubishi A6M Rei-sen ('Zero' to allied pilots). J Robert Oppenheimer was a US physicist who led the development of the nuclear bomb.

Note that The Wind Rises is only partly based on Horikoshi's life, and also borrows from Hori Tatsuo's semi-autobiographical novel The Wind has Risen (itself named after a French poem) and director Hayao Miyazaki's childhood experiences of WW2.