mjevans

I'm reminded of wish-granting genies, and then of 'undefined behavior' and compilers...

The filled out ballot is intended to be fully anonymous.

It is then slipped into a security sleeve to make it harder to read within the envelope.

The envelope is sealed and signed by the citizen.

Security is provided by the envelope which is the attestation that the citizen cast their ballot. Offhand, the county voting office is likely required to retain the ballot as part of the state/federal records. I haven't checked but that or a centralized ballot repository are the only things that make sense.

The log needs to document, at least in broad steps and critical details, what the next operation is and what key parameters were provided to it.

A human, or an 'agent' can use those to figure out why said next step might have gone wrong.

I stopped reading at 'for profit'.

Basic functions of society should never be run by 'for profit' standards. Do you want a 'for profit' fire department, medical care system, or law enforcement systems? These are core support services for an orderly society.

Citizens that rely upon these services in their time of need often have no other recourse.

There are many references, it's more important to have a general sense of what's happening and the relative costs than hard numbers (which tend to shift as hardware gets closer to ideal and software becomes worse at avoiding bloat).

https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer?tab=read...

Are they a rare artisan rather than a commodity? Maybe a subtype or cross-trained variation of some other wider job role?

I'm wondering what the heck will pay the bills on all that 'AI' hardware that's being put out there. So far the number of ideas that sound like an episode of some tech-horror show far outweigh the ones that sound like a Star Trek utopia.

Anything that is infected by UCS-2 / UTF-16 garbage should be revised and reconsidered... Yeah UTF-8 has carve outs for those escape sequences... However JSON is even worse, you _have_ to use UTF-16 escapes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#Character_encoding

I think that's likely to work as a no-op

Taking such a fee also has transaction costs, in the time if nothing else.

To liken this back to the old days - the difference in time between flashing a valid transfer slip (of paper) and having to drop change into the automated till.

That's my observation / fear as well. It makes delivering something that sort of works easy. It makes doing that well more difficult by obscuring the problem domain from the humans and expanding the standard library of tools into patterns of using said standard library. Hope they're correct for your use case.

There's also the question of the true cost of all the hardware, electricity, and potential output that's being tossed onto the pyres. We aren't getting the real Cortana from the books / games; we're getting GIR trained on the corpus of fallible human code, prompted by fallible humans.

Were the market functioning, there would be sufficient additional housing near jobs that investors could not sit on and rent-seek reselling property near those jobs as a source of profit.

The market is not free. It is heavily regulated by what can be built where when. There is a distinct lack of planning and regulation to protect consumers in this market.

The foil is the 'meat' the rollers are the bread.

I suspected it wasn't just battery farms, but more like what you see in less mass market scifi where the humans are used for more than just batteries... they'd also be some storage and processing for the system (and no longer humans).

However at that point I don't see the value of retaining the human form. It's for a story obviously, but a not-human computational device can still be made out of carbon processing units rather than silicon or semiconductors generally.

IMO there was one other fatal mistake. Dialup internet was also at and passing it's peek. This was the moment when anyone serious about connecting to anything wanted at least DSL if not one of those fast new 'Cable modem' connections.

Today people would think someone is an alien for releasing a console or handheld that didn't support wireless (ethernet) connectivity in at least some way. In that era, it's shocking that a communications module wasn't at least an optional swap in to allow for a selection between a standard modem or a standard (hopefully easy to source) ethernet card. Heck if there were an 'OS module' that games had to call down to it might even obfuscate the difference between dialup, lan, and later wifi modules.

No - Kid friendly should be something site's Attest to and claim they ARE. That becomes an FTC enforceable market claim (or insert other thing here).

Foreign sites, places that aren't trying to publish things for children? The default state should be unrated content for consumers (adults) prepared to see the content they asked for.

It's been too long so I only vaguely remember Wave.

It was a little too early to market. Common PCs weren't quite good enough, and common Internet was very not good enough.

The UI also didn't quite help shape normal user workflows enough so it was hard for an average user to just pick it up and be productive.

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I think I'd like to see some merger of 'checklists', 'events' (calendar / etc), and 'conversations' much more like Slack channels where each new topic is a thread / email chain.

The silly move from /bin to /usr/bin broke lots of distros. Probably would have worked out if they'd had cp --reflink=auto --update to help ease migrations from files in /bin to /usr/bin and then just symlinked /bin to /usr/bin . However then any setups where /usr is a distinct filesystem from / would hard-require initramfs to set that up before handoff.

The python (is python2) transition was even more silly though. Breaking changes to the API and they wanted (and did!) force re-pointing the command to python3? That's still actively breaking stuff today in places that are forsaken enough to have to support python2 legacy systems.

I recalled there were some new instructions added that greatly help with this. Unfortunately I'm not finding any good _webpages_ that describe the operation generally to give me a good overview / refresher. Everything seems to either directly quote published PDF documents or otherwise not actually present the information in it's effective for end use form. E.G. https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/ -- However availability is problematic for even slightly older silicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64

- XSAVE / XRSTOR

- XSAVEOPT / XRSTOR

- XSAVEC / XRSTOR

- XSAVES / XRSTORS

How about just requiring browser, OS vendors, and phone makers to give parents real child accounts that are easy to use and keep kids off the Internet?

No, but you can establish limits, like the total set of possible solutions.

That's the mindset isn't it?

*Punitive* use of force.

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Batman usually doesn't do too badly. Not only is it fiction but they're often against fiction level villains who are 'hardened' criminals in literal senses. Even then the violence tends to stop at the point where actual resistance stops. (They get tied up and delivered to the cops with maybe the black eye used in the initial apprehension.)

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Contrast this with what we see repeatedly on TV when poorly trained and poorly supervised law enforcement officers beat down or outright murder someone until they're not just not resisting anymore but are outright _unable_ to resist at all. Such excessive use of force in a professional context should also be a crime that is punished with congruent weight for the breach trust in a public official absent extenuating circumstances ('I had an emotional reaction' leading directly to deadly force should not be such a circumstance).

I do recall a highly unfortunate case of someone from WA state who was on some combination of super drugs such that there didn't appear to be a reasonable application of force to result in a successful outcome. More and better tools might help. Maybe net launchers and methods of incapacitating someone at a bit of a distance for mutual safety?

Empowering the 'User' (hardware owner) should have always been the focus.

From that mindset what makes sense are hardware vendors including a cache of trusted third party root certificates from known other vendors. Today this would include Microsoft, the same said hardware vendor, probably various respected Linux organizations/groups (Offhand, Linux Foundation, ArchLinux, Debian, IBM/RedHat, Oracle, SUSE, etc), similar for BSD...

Crucially the end user should then be ASKED which to enable. None should be enrolled out of the box. They might also be enabled only for specific things. E.G. HW vendor could be enabled only for new system firmware signatures (load using the existing software) rather than generic UEFI boot targets. The user should also be able to enroll their own CA certs as well; multiple of them. Useful for Organization, Division Unit, and system local signatures.

It would also, really, be nice if UEFI mandated a uniform access API (maybe it does) for local blobs stored in non mass-storage space. This would be a great place to stash things like UEFI drivers for accessing additional types of hardware drivers, OS boot bits + small related files, etc. I would have said 1GB of storage would be more than sufficient for this - however Microsoft has proven that assumption incorrect. Still it'd be nice to have a standard place and a feature that says the system ships with this much reliable secondary storage included (or maybe 1-2 micro-SD card slots, etc).

It has never _not_ been time to build all the power plants we can environmentally afford.

More power enables higher quality of living and more advanced civilization. It will be put to use doing something useful, or at the very worst it'll make doing existing useful things less expensive opening them up to more who would like those things.

Should still count if you can be 'drafted' into an 'office job' right?

Is that a reference to one of the sources of the civil war in the US? Voting rights for disenfranchised (literally enslaved) people?

Your company is selling the 'valet service' more than the products.

There are people willing to pay for convenience AND security at the same time (hire someone else to manage the problem, and they're the 'key').

NT4 started with a kernel mode, user mode, security model and drivers had to be written and validated accordingly.

9x, me, and even compatibility parts of XP (up to some service patch IIRC? Might have been SP2) would still allow dos mode realtime BS for any driver that wanted.

I loath all the dang software modems too cheep to ship a decent device in a single unit and instead slice off the user's already constrained resources.

Mutate things so fast cancer looks like stable.

I'm fine with this, as long as they DO NOT require any form of ID or 'age' verification.

Instead this should be attacked from the profit side, by banning any form of advertising which might target children. If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.