New version of Rectum now produces shit at 3 times closer to shit consistency benchmarks than previous versions of competitors Anus and Colon. Given that we've already decided that you just need more shit constantly and forever and will shove it into every aspect of your life, this must make you very happy.

The capacity of the government of a large jurisdiction like California, or more particularly the US, could bankrupt someone like Musk, so I say, bring it on. Within a decade Musk would have abandoned all efforts, or, even better, be stone cold broke (frankly billionaires shouldn't exist at all, and we should tax the living fuck out of them down to their last $200 million).

We're too afraid of these modern day Bond villains when we should be aiming every financial, and probably every real, cannon straight at them and putting them in a sense of mortal danger every minute of their waking lives, so that they literally piss themselves in terror at the though that "we the people" might decide to wipe them out for good.

One also needs to remember the US is a big country. The continental US is just a tiny bit smaller than the entire continent of Europe. The UK is only a few hundred miles tall - California is about 66% bigger. Travelling between the UK, France and Germany is only travelling between a few states.

A high speed train from New York to Chicago would be an undertaking of a huge scale it would put it in the top 10 total operational lengths of high speed rail. (That is, that one line would be longer than most countries total amount of operational high speed rail).

The US is huge. I think even California's attempt would rival many high speed rail lines in Europe.

The US is about the size of China, and China is leading the world (by a wide margin) on high speed rail, but they have several advantages in being able to bulldoze through a high speed rail line plus being able to do it with modern technology and very little existing infrastructure to get in the way. If you're laying down infrastructure, it's a lot easier to do it all at once than piecemeal over hundreds of years.

Most jobs in a bureaucracy are useless and not productive

That's only true when jobs got replaced. The typing pool was an important part of business exchange because chickenscratch was hard to read. Schools had stopped teaching handwriting as a course - I said handwriting and nut cursive, because schools used to force you to be able to write legibly as a matter of course. If you had poor motor control you got stuck writing hours and hours of lines until it was pretty enough. Typewriters eliminated the need for people to be extremely neat and freed up education time from rote writing of letters to higher levels of instruction.

And it was the days where bad handwriting would get the back of your hand caned.

So the typing pool was necessary - you could get a letter drafted and typed out neatly and send it off to a client who would get this nice looking letter rather than a handwritten hard to decipher note. At the same time, the typing pool wrote up all the documentation for the project - you might share handwritten notes amongst the team, but you'd send your information out through the typing pool.

Once computers started becoming common, the need for the typing pool lessened and by the 90s was basically gone and everyone was expected to have basic skills.

Sure there are people doing useless jobs, but they're generally only one and two in oddball areas. There's no typing pool anymore because that was many people and as the need for them lessened, so did their numbers. Likewise, any engineering firm would have a calculator room where you'd send your calculations to be done by people with adding machines, and they almost went away with the advent of electronic calculators and computers. (NASA kept them around until the 1990s or so when Johnson retired because astronauts would ask her to confirm the computer's calculations).

The "useless" people you mention are generally the leftovers because someone somewhere still didn't want to do things themselves. They don't really accumulate.

What you are thinking of might be useless processes. You know, where you have to go through a whole requisitions process just to get a stapler where just getting the approvals often cost several times more than the item itself. That exists in a lot of places, and is what you are thinking of, because it's forcing people to be kept around who do nothing but manage the process.

But as DOGE showed, you can't just cut the people - because if the process needs to be done, you've just eliminated the people who are managing it and now the pipeline backs up. It only works if you cut the process first, then eliminate the people.

Alas, some process is necessary - often instituted as a CYA. Your boss asking you to do something illegal, and you asking them for it by email is a process so you have documentation. But it's a process, and that's how it all starts. Government is full of process because often it's to ensure fairness - you didn't exclude supplier X because you've have a beef with who runs the company - you excluded supplier X because product Y they offered didn't meet your specification Z. So when supplier X sues you (and they always do), you have a piece of paper that clearly shows that was the case. If they pursue the matter, you can ask them about why specification Z was not met by the product and why it's in the specification at all because the process is so well documented.

Think of when NASA awards SpaceX the next contract. ULA will likely tie up NASA and SpaceX in a lawsuit so convoluted because DOGE cut the people who would be able to demonstrate why SpaceX was the right choice and the documentation backing that up. And in the end, NASA, SpaceX and ULA would've spent billions on lawyers and dozens of years because DOGE saved $1M on personnel they thought was "unnecessary".

We need people to stop worrying about their kids going to school in the dark. I walked through it throughout my schooling. Parents these days drop their kids off.

And get kids outside. "Freedom" as a kid was on a bike, and a pre-teen on a bike can easily cover several miles in a reasonable amount of time. Which in most places should be able to get you to a store and back.

The problem is generally infrastructure and poorly designed neighborhoods - ones where you can be 500 feet away as the crow flies, but take 5 miles to drive because the road system is absurdly designed. (Likewise fat chance at being able to walk there because no one thought people would want to walk - and 500 feet is likely quicker than driving 5 miles).

It's really the effect of a car-centric city design - using a bike to go to the store was a common thing - and cycling a few miles is trivial so a bike is real freedom to a kid able to ride to the store, or cycle to school. The problem is the roads are just not designed for anything but cars making them horrendously dangerous to walk the mile to school (a mile is around a 20 minute walk). Kids would file out the doors and walk in groups that separated as the streets branched out.

Now you have kids being dropped off at their friends place... 3 doors down. LItearlly - start the car, warm up the engine, drive the 100 feet to the friend's house, then drive back.

Walkable is not a bad word, and while hard to do in the suburbs because few of them have bodegas or convenience stores nearby enough, they're still compact that a bike ride can be possible. Many suburbs are often near enough to a big box store like a Walmart even as the crow flies, but the road design ensures you're driving 5 miles to get to the parking lot than if someone had the brilliant idea of making a cycle path so you could get there by cycling. Even the newest e-scooter trend makes this actually doable before one gets their driver's license.

Also cheaper than an Uber, and more exercise.

The main reason for pseudorandom codes was less about jamming and more about being able to grab a really weak signal buried in the noise. CDMA works by increasing the band's noise level but by running the noise through a correlator the signal.

CDMA is "magic" in that you can get at signals buried below the noise floor - that by running the received noise through a correlator, a desired signal could magically pop out of the noise. Well, it wasn't quite so - the real noise floor (caused by everything) is still an issue and buries all the signal, but the PRN transmissions added pseudo random noise so the apparent noise floor is higher, but that's still a usable signal.

The other way is the PRN spreads the signal out - current signals relied on narrowband transmissions contained in a very narrow part of the allocated spectrum. PRN modulation spread it out over many MHz (considered very advanced). Spread spectrum technology means narrowband interference is ignored (the correlation process takes the spread spectrum signal and makes it a narrowband signal which can be processed later, and vice-versa, so that interference appears as noise in the output)

As a result, the late 90s introduced 12 channel GPS receives - previous receivers could only lock onto one or a few satellites at a time to get the timing code, but the 12 channel receiver was made possible because of advances in digital signal processing technology. As the output was of a single RF input it could be digitally split internally and run through multiple correlator cores simultaneously trying to lock on to the PRN codes. This made for extremely fast initial fix times.

This is one reason why GPS startup times can vary - from over 25 minutes if the receiver has to manually try to acquire a signal in an unknown time and an unknown location - it's going to have to try all the PRN codes and slide them back and forth to see if they could decode a signal. Once it acquires a satellite lock, it then needs to download the almanac data which tells the receiver where the satellites are. It takes 12-15 minutes to download a complete copy of the almanac. Once the GPS receiver has an idea of satellite positions, knowing the ID of the current satellite it's acquired means it can narrow the search of satellites it should see to the ones that are in the same hemisphere as the satellite it can see. Since there can at most be 12 satellites in the hemisphere, the other 11 receives are programmed with the satellite PRN codes and they begin searching for that specific satellite.

Once you get 3 locked on then your position can be found. Now, most GPS receives aren't taken out of storage - they're used fairly often, which is why even a GPS receiver that's been sitting around, but not recently used can often initialize itself within 5 minutes - it assumes its location hasn't changed, and the almanac data it has is "good enough" so it can program the receivers with the PRN codes of the satellites it should be seeing at that point in time. It still needs to download the complete data, but a first lock is much quicker because the partial data it has is good enough to get first fix (which is why it's Time To First Fix - 25+ minutes from a complete initialization, 5 from a cold start - it still needs a complete copy of the almanac and that takes 12-15 minutes but it has existing data that is "good enough" for now).

The TOFF is down to 30 seconds if you've used the GPS recently and thus the almanac data is not only mostly up to date, but your position is likely the same and the PRN code search is a lot smaller since it's likely close but needs to account for drift. The search space is much smaller.

Your phone, though, has an advantage in that GPS almanac data is often available through side channels - it's part of the control plane. When your cellphone turns on, it locks onto a network (subscribed or not) and receives control plane data (tells it carrier and other things) which includes the current GPS almanac. This is transmitted very quickly (GPS datarate is around 160 bits/second, the control plane data rate is much faster so that took 12-15 minutes takes a few seconds or so). This happens anytime it has a signal - because even "No Service" still allows emergency calls and GPS data needs to be quickly available.

Note in North America, the E911 spec calls for GPS location to be sent via the control plane so your location is sent back while you're talking with the 911 operator. In Europe, less so and there are various specifications on sending emergency location data via the data plane, a slightly trickier prospect (what if the user has no data plan?).

Microsoft is not a person. It is a massive company capable of pursuing many mandates, some of which can either appear or can actually be entirely at odds with each other.

Even if the prediction of comparatively controlled impact is accurate; I think it's worth considering just how grim it is likely to be; not in purely economic terms; but in the character of the work.

Maybe this is a personal peculiarity; but I that there's something exquisitely dispiriting about beating your head against people who are stubborn or clueless enough that every conversation is just a baffling sequence of different confusions, some of the repeated from previously. It's a totally different thing from dealing with someone who is merely ignorant; but learning, especially if they are enthusiastic about it.

Even if everything is fine in terms of job pace and security and all; that seems like it is shaping up to be a really hellish aspect of dealing with bots. The experience is sort of a somewhat weirder simulation of dealing with a chirpy, people-pleasing, very-junior type; except they are far more likely to lie than to admit ignorance; and they never learn(possibly the SaaS guys hoovering up your interactions in the background will make the next iteration better, possibly not, progress seems to have slowed considerably after only a brief period of improvement; but a given release is more or less full groundhog day).

That seems like a nightmare. Everything that sucks about teaching or mentoring; but precisely none of the rewarding aspects.

"No backup" is amateur-level. Also that they did not use n-out-of-k with n k is a pretty basic mistake.

Especially for people who do cryptography as their livelihood. They understand the importance of keys and to keep them safe.

Not using n of k is understandable - not every situation warrants n of k and they were likely thinking that it would be fine for all three people to be in charge of the results. N of k usually is for situations where you want K people to have the key so only N of them need to be present. Like if you were accessing say, a secret vault - you want N people to verify everyone's role in the access, but K people need access.

Here all 3 people likely were going to be needed to certify the election results so having 2 of 3 wouldn't have done anything other than let one of them lose the key.

30 GB of Mail Storage
300 GB of Send Storage
15 Email Addresses
3 Custom Domains
Is a good amount of service for $9 a month. I assume that this is 15 different logins. Proton is $7 per user.

I pay $11.50/month for 500GB of storage. It's a hosting service called OpalStack. You can have unlimited email accounts, unlimited domains as long as it all fits in 500GB

Sure it's $2.50 a month more, but you get hosting as well. And it's a full Linux shell prompt, no chintzy CPanel or other service - full linux LAMP hosting of whatever you want.

The problem is not the few parents who are homeschooling because their kid isn't getting adequate education, it's the larger majority of people who are homeschooling, or rather "unschooling". Usually because they don't want their kids exposed to "strange kids" (kids who are non-white, or do things that are unusual), or exposed to "bad ideas".

If you don't know, that's when parents are basically not teaching them anything - they grow up to be 18 and have the social skills of a 5 year old, math below a Grade 5 level (they can barely add two single-digit numbers together), and are completely hopeless.

Yes, there are people growing up literally as dumb as rocks. Their parents teach them that ignorance is good. Just vote Republican and all will be well with the world, and stay away from anyone with a different skin color as they're evil. Just stick around and do the family business and you'll be alright.

It's an alarming trend, and sadly, they outnumber the few kids who actually get a decent or better education at home.

I'm sure soon enough you'll get HEVC enablers in the Windows Store where you can pay $5 and enable hardware HEVC decode.

But it's likely not a huge issue - HEVC would only apply for 4K videos, and web videos are using either h.264 or AV1. Some streaming services are using HEVC, but the patent issues have generally steered them to using h.264

HEVC is generally reserved only for Blu-Ray playback, and since UHD Blu-Ray is not possible on PCs anymore, it's basically relatively useless. Everyone else uses h.264 or AV1

/. can't do UTF

It can, actually. It just implements an ASCII filter because you must sanitize your input, especially Unicode. Anyone who doesn't sanitize their Unicode is asking for trouble as people abuse Unicode to screw up your webpage. It's trivial to make say, a page unreadable if you do not implement any filters.

If you count by characters, you can ingest megabytes of Unicode because you can have unlimited decorations on a character. You have to limit your inputs and you have to limit what you can input. Unicode is ever evolving and new codepoints are constantly being defined that can mess with you. /. filters to just the ASCII set in a very hacky but correct way of whitelisting allowed Unicode characters.

It's also advanced enough to filter HTML entities which can contain arbitrary Unicode codepoints, to avoid the same issue. It's supported, just filtered.

Don't forget the costs to examine everything to make sure there weren't any other surprises hidden somewhere else.

Forensic computer analysts aren't cheap.

His script might have just changed passwords, but you don't know if he did anything else.

I would probably say the costs were probably under-reported and just what they could adequately document as damages. Someone who couldn't log in for a day and do useful work might not be reported because there's no direct cost, just an indirect one of having someone sit around twiddling thumbs. And that's assuming they need the computer - maybe they could do work offline or do it on their work laptop not attached to the network. Someone like that you can't add to your claim because they could do useful work and separating the costs gets really hard.

Sounds like there are plants within Mozilla, in addition to all the other problems. So it's effectively as shady as Edge or Chrome now. Having to comb through the menus to turn off anything trying to give me AI or coupons, and still never really being sure.

Don't forget about the ad tracking that's on by default as well. Mozilla bought an ad-tech company founded by Meta ex-employees and enabled ad tracking by default.