Long ago when I left IBM, I modeled my resignation letter very closely after their layoff notices;

"I regret to inform you that your services as an employer are no longer required...." :-)

I would agree if this were not a response to attacks already carried out by the enemy. When responding to a bully, you need to do it overtly -- publicly and obviously -- so everyone sees what happens and who is doing it. Otherwise it is wasted effort.

This is about showing everyone (not just the bully) the consequences. In short, when someone fucks around, make sure they find out. (And ensure everyone else who is considering fucking around clearly sees the consequences.)

If there is no response it will never end -- well or otherwise. The only way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him. In the context of Russia and Putin, you have to make their games costly enough that their cost/benefit analysis comes up in favor of not attacking and destabilizing western democracies.

Lack of response and Russia's behavior will only escalate until there is a response. This has been shown again and again.

Using violence (which killed several and seriously injured dozens) or threats of violence to achieve political ends (overthrowing an election) is the *very definition* of terrorism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If a site wishes to charge google for linking to their content, google should charge that site for indexing it and sending traffic their way.

Hydro can be used for base load, but that's a waste. The best virtue of hydro is that it can be turned on and off very quickly -- seconds to minutes. Vs hours for coal or gas fired plants, or days for nuclear. This makes it ideal for responding to spikes in load.

I agree that nuclear (and perhaps something a little more modern like traveling wave or something recent like that) for base load, plus solar, wind and waves (with batteries for load equalization) plus hydro for load variations will bring us to 0 emissions. But coal burning needs to stop yesterday.

Google (in Australia and other countries that start playing these games) should charge for directing traffic towards any site that want to charge google.

Why is it fair for a news site to charge google for the ability to link to them, but unfair for google to charge for that service?

At IBM we used to call this "Schedule Chicken" Every team knew they were not going to meet the schedule, but nobody wanted to be the first ones to admit it. Once one group flinched and admitted they were blowing their dates, other teams would own up to it. Same thing will happen here -- other parts of the system, in addition to this one, will turn out not to be ready for November 2021.

Most people have no idea how blockchain works. How will we trust an election whose very foundation is not understood by a majority of voters? The current election has so much disinformation and outright lies flying around it that I can't imagine anyone sane proposing a system any less transparent than the one we have now. And no -- just because it would be open source doesn't mean anything if there are enough who distrust it.

Is probably Trump2020, TrumpJr2024, or Ivanka2024 :-)

Add to this the more modern capabilities we have now to print each ballot with a unique number on it -- allowing for tracking ballots to ensure that they are not going missing, or being counted more than once, and ensuring that someone can't just print one off with a random number and have it work.

Throw in the federal offense and penalties for tampering with mail, the ability to fully audit and recount (full real-world paper trail) and any cheating or fraud will be extremely hard to scale up or pass undetected.

Slavery is alive and well in the good old US of A. In fact, there are more black slaves in the US today than there were in the year before the civil war. You all don't call them "slaves" you call them "prisoners", but it's the same thing. You force them to work for virtually no wages.

Alias/Autodesk Sketchbook was/is a fairly popular drawing app, and the Andriod and iOs versions are virtually identical (and when they were not free, were of similar price). At the point where both versions had been available for a few years (free and paid versions for both platforms), the user population was predominately on Android (roughly 80%), however around 90% of the revenue was from iOS version of the app. On Android, almost all users were satisfied with the free (and limited) version of the app. On iOS, we were able to persuade many more people to pay a couple of dollars for the paid version of the application.

The American left would be considered, in any other country, to be center-right. The *far* left in America would be just barely left of center in any other country.

Most of you seem so terrified of a government that might spend money to help someone who is not exactly like you. (You seem comfortable spending insane amounts of money on military and corporate welfare and subsidies, and agricultural welfare, but god forbid that someone with slightly off-white skin should get to see a doctor without paying.