I was worried, because there were not enough government bureaucrats between me and my grocer. Fortunately, Republicans will fix the glitch!

100%. I know a lot of very smart people who know they are smart, and have thus determined that they are always correct. In their chosen field this is often true; but outside of their specialty, their intelligence just lets them build ever more complicated mental structures to support their bizarre conspiratorial beliefs.

I'm not immune to this myself, but I know that I am not immune so I try to accept that I am often wrong and find my inevitable errors.

I've always preferred working with smart people who know their limits and check their work, over absolute geniuses who steamroll over everyone since they _know_ they are never wrong.

Just like the Alabama Supreme Court.

Classic. When people realize "my side is crazy" they have two options:
    * Admit that their side is crazy, and try to fix things (or move to the sane side), or
    * Make up shit about the other side, then claim "both sides are crazy so it's okay if i support the crazy"

One is honest, but it means you have to admit to being wrong, so most folks go for option 2 and happily make up shit.

I haven't seen any major conflicts between Democracy and Woke (no matter which definition of Woke people use this week), but Democracy does not support Insurrection at all. You can, however, deploy an instance of Insurrection to attempt a manual downgrade/migration of Democracy to Fascism (see Jan 6).

Weird... why are you assuming this doesn't apply to other parts of the federal government? My reading of the constitution is that states get the same number of representatives no matter if they allow all adult citizens to vote for them, or only white male landowners. They get the same number of senators no matter if all registered voters can vote for those senators, or only those with proper ID (gun permits without photos are allowed, while student IDs with photos are disallowed, because freedom and security!)

And since most other high-ranking positions are confirmed by the senate, it's turtles all the way down.

Oh, the problems with the 250-year-old version go far deeper. IMO one of the biggest ones is that (due to the electoral college) a state has the exact same power to affect the federal government regardless of how many people vote. This means that states have a very strong incentive to deny people the ability to vote and to make it harder to vote, at least for those people who will not vote the way those lawmakers want. I strongly support a patch to make voting a right that can only be taken away in extreme circumstances, though this patch will be strongly opposed by those who hate democracy.

Also, state governments are probably allowed to ignore the vote entirely and send their own slate of electors, and a few states have passed laws to do this if they allege some fake "voter fraud". Again, if anyone wants to know who hates democracy and the constitution, see who supports these laws.

US has the production version (if a 250 year old version with only a few patches applied), but a large portion of the population has decided that democracy is "woke" and is actively trying to delete it.

It's worse than that. Locks use gravity to move water around. The lake water is at a much higher elevation, so it's ideal for running the canal. Using sea water would involve pumping lots of sea water to a high elevation, which is not just an engineering problem, but a power problem, which cannot be worked around or fixed with redesign.

I mean, Google managed to implement E2EE on all android phones, even though the hardware and many pieces of the software are controlled by the manufacturer. And I believe that other vendors are following Google's spec for E2EE over RCS, though I don't know if any are released yet.

Ummm... E2EE solutions for messaging systems predate iMessage and the iPhone. I'm sorry that you think that Apple invented the concept, but they didn't. They just wrote one particular implementation of the concept. I seem to recall that Apple initially said they would release the iMessage spec so that non-iPhones could use it, but they later changed their mind.

I don't understand your argument. Both iMessage and RCS+E2EE are secure and private. (Secure and private for mass-market chat systems, at least, but that's all most people want.) The insecure and non-private systems are SMS and MMS. (Note that to implement iMessage or RCS you need access to texting services (SMS) so that there is a fallback.)

Google wants RCS+E2EE on all systems. It's available on all Android phones and is starting to appear on feature phones, but Apple will not allow it on iPhones. Apple has announced that they will eventually implement RCS, but not E2EE, and Apple does not permit any non-Apple app to interact with texting services (so nobody else can implement it on iOS).

Apple has iMessage on all Apple systems, but will not permit it on non-Apple systems, and the whole point of TFA is that Apple is enforcing this by tweaking their servers. Apple could implement iMessage on Android (they probably have internal binaries to do just that), or could permit someone else to implement iMessage on Android, and Google could not stop them (even if they wanted to, though they don't) since Android's texting services can be used by non-Google apps.

So, text messages between Apple and Android devices have to fall back to SMS/MMS, which are terrible, insecure, easy to redirect and easy to snoop, and (in the case of MMS) only kinda work even for their designed purpose. And the fall-back to terrible SMS/MMS is desired and enforced by Apple and only Apple.

It's not an argument, it's a fact.

If you use Apple devices and iMessage, then you are giving money to the company which could secure your communications but chooses not to. Their oft stated motive is money; if they let iMessage on non-Apple devices, then they believe that some people may switch from iOS to Android, costing Apple profit.

This is your choice. You can give your money to a company which has demonstrated that your privacy and security are less important than their profit margin. I mean, I choose not to do so, but if that is okay with you, "Apple's profit is WAY MORE IMPORTANT than my privacy" is a valid moral stance. If not, well, "vote with your wallet" is the only type of voting which large companies understand.

There are multiple ways Apple can shut this down, and they will. Which is a shame. Apple has the choice of either allowing secure and private communication, or making more money. Apple has constantly chosen more money, by making sure that when their customers communicate with non-Apple folks, the messages are insecure and non-private. That's Apple's right, of course. But I'm tired of people claiming that Apple prioritizes privacy and security, when Apple has constantly demonstrated the opposite.

Well, most of the code I write would be much much shorter if I just never added error checking, bounds checking, fallback code, graceful degradation, unit tests, corner-case handling, and a host of other things which separate a good reliable program from an error-ridden piece of garbage.

Laws are the same way. We'd all love short trivial laws, but experience has shown that short trivial laws have loopholes and special cases that unscrupulous people use for ill effect. And it turns out that there are a lot more smart unscrupulous people than there are smart dedicated people writing good laws. Thus, we end up with long complicated laws.

This is actually not "obviously" true. Many services have ways to authenticate with a service but then pass your authorization to a third party. Hell, I implemented OpenID around 20 years ago to let people authenticate to my web site using third-party credentials. The fact that Apple chooses not to do this means that the security issues are 50% due to Nothing (because what the fuck were they thinking?) and 50% Apple (because Apple talks about privacy and security, but doesn't act on those words if you ever dare to communicate with any of the non-Apple-purchasing heathens in the world). Apple could have implemented a secure way for third parties to use iMessage, but they care a lot about money and very little about privacy, so Apple just followed the dollars.

This is why I don't give my dollars to Apple, but everyone should make their own choices.