And this is tagged "troll."

The truth is that Rust's cheerleaders have been trolling since the beginning about memory safety.

You do not appear to understand what a republic or a democracy is, so I'll ignore the last sentence.

"Independent" does not mean unaccountable to the people. The President is independent of Congress, and vice versa, but both are accountable to the people. Well, the current president doesn't seem to think so, but legally he is.

The civil service is not a part of the executive but is a co-equal branch.

You are correct. In principle, presidents have no authority whatsoever to dictate how an agency runs. The executive branch should have zero authority over the civil service, which is intended to constitute a fourth co-equal branch of government.

In the US, in principle, the status of the civil service as co-equal to, and independent of, the executive should be added to the Constitution and enshrined in law for good measure. Not that that would help much with the current SCOTUS, but a Constitutional change might possibly persuade the current government that absolute authoritatian control is not as popular as Trump thinks.

That is the idea that, in Britain, entities like the NHS and the BBC have operated under. Charters specify the responsibilties and duties, and guarantee the funding needed to provide these, but the organisation is (supposed) to carry these out wholly independently of the government of the day.

It actually worked quite well for some time, but has been under increasing pressure and subject to increasing government sabotage over the past 20-25 years.

It's also the idea behind science/engineering research funding bodies the world over. These should direct funding for grant proposals not on political whim or popularity but on the basis of what is actually needed. Again, though, it does get sabotaged a fair bit.

Exactly how you'd mitigate this is unclear, many governments have - after all - the leading talent in manipulation, corruption, and kickbacks. But presumably, strategies can be devised to weaken political influence.

You want to sign an NDA to stop your business secrets from getting out? Fine.

But that should not let you refuse to talk to the law.

Imagine a crook that says, "I am sorry, but my NDA with the Cartel prevents me from revealing how we get the Cocaine here."

That is NOT any different from a car repair business saying "I am sorry, but my NDA with TESLA prevents me from talking about the safety issues with their breaks.

Or a cop saying his NDA prevents him from revealing how he suspected the criminal.

No I am saying that no single database should exist for all of their customers.

Amazon does not need to store passwords in the same database they store the sales information in. One database could contain just their encrypted passwords and the emails.

Another could store customers names and addresses.

And each database could be under the control of a different director who gets to maintain their security in a different manner.

Also, Amazon has different businesses. No need for the kindle unlimited accounts to be in the same database as the music accounts. No need for the Whole Foods to be in the same database as the Amazon Fresh. No need for Amazon Medical to be in the same etc. etc. etc.

What is going on is that the businesses are doing things for their own convenience that endanger their customers. NO!

You want to run a business with a million customers? Fine - more power for you. But you do NOT get to run this massive industry in a way that saves you a ton of money but also puts all your customer's privacy in danger.

Just as a small business is required to take minimal steps to ensure the safety of their customer data, you - being a huge business - is required to take HUGE steps to ensure the safety of customer data.

You do not get to use your economies of scale to endanger your customers data.

Trying to increase penalties is incredibly stupid. That only makes things worse. Let me be clear There is NO way to stop this kind of breach from happening again.

The problem is that morons believe they will never be robbed. There is no one with perfect security. The more valuable your data, the more likely it WILL be broken into. Every security professional or database designer (AND their bosses) should be required to sign a statement that says this every year.

AI will only make it worse as bad actors / governments will begin to set AI to find the exploits.

The only solution is to prevent companies from collecting and maintaining this level of information.

There was no need for a single database to contain 34 million people's key addresses and key codes to enter residential building. No need for a database to contain more than keycodes for more than a single building. Even if your company owns multiple buildings or runs security for multiple buildings.

The proper solution is to outlaw the creation of such massive databases. You want to contain information on more than 1 million people? Then there should be massive limitations on what it can contain. No passwords at all for something that large. Name, Address and Phone numbers should already be suspect at 1 million entrees.

If you have 34 stores, then keep 34 separate databases that have a different security system for each of them.

Oh, I long for the day when the US president had scandals about things like pronunciation, spelling, or clothing.

Can we please go back to arguing about the lack of of a flag pin rather than war crimes?

Q: What's in the box?
A: We don't really know, lol, but it seems to work okay!
Q: Will it keep my data secure?
A: There's no way to know, let's just hope for the best!

If you are trying to do what is called technical trading - looking at graphs to decide which day to buy or sell - this is why you do not become rich. The people that invented the math based trading 50 years ago have moved on to this super fast analysis and trading.

For those of you that think these a-holes do not contribute anything, they do provide liquidity. It keeps spreads tight - and lets you do option trading in between the bid and ask. (When the bid is 105 and the ask is 115, the technical traders snap up your options trade at 110 - but only if you do the limit order.)

1) Actual cost of electrical charger is minimum. Pennies. The chargers themselves are also cheap. The main cost is installation.

2) The reason electric cars do not reduce the demand for gasoline are the hybrids. Because charging is cheap at home but incredibly expensive away from home, smart people buy the hybrids and get gasoline when away from home. If we can bring down the cost of charging on the road, gas prices will drop.

3) Oil companies cannot stop the inevitable move from gas to electricity. They can slow it down - by driving up the cost to recharge your car. Hence issue 2 above.

4) You are not Subsidizing electrical cars - the electrical cars subsidize you. Trump killed all the minor electrical subsidies - but the current bill has the US government spending $40 Billion to subsidize oil companies.

5) I suggested the apartments, offices, and condos offer charging at cost rather than subsidize them.

You are experiencing "But but me..." Syndrome. When the someone suggests a new project to equalize things, the other people think "Oh, they want a benefit but do not want to give me the same thing".

What they do not realize is that you were ALREADY getting massive benefits, and the new people are just asking for the same stuff you already get. If you want to know what happens a country actually subsidies electrical cars go to Europe - the gas prices are twice that in the US.

Energy has always been the main constraint on economies. The growth of our economies has generally been the growth of our energy sources. At first it was wood, then coal, then natural gas, etc. etc. etc.

From the day Edison and Tesla started to electrify the world, electricity has been the main constraint of economic growth.

It will continue to be so until we get some new, Star Trek energy source. (Off topic but.... Star Trek because Star Wars is really Wizards in space, while Star Trek is Science Fiction. If your heroes use swords to save the day, that is fantasy. If they ask the Engineer - whether he is missing a finger from WW II or was blind from birth - that is Science to the rescue!)

First, people overestimate how intelligent our technology is. Humans are a generalist species that are given about 20 years education on general knowledge and then spend 4+ years specializing. That is we first learn everything and then succeed by learning one thing. We take AI and do not give it any general knowledge, rather instantly teaching it in a specialized manner. This is why we do not have to teach a human not to lie in court, that when we say no elephants not to put an elephant in a drawing, or that we need to check our work. All of those things had to be added on to AI because they did not know it at first. Humans know so many things - while the AI knows so little. We only think AI is smart because we test it on things it is good at. In general, it is a moron. Ever ask a text AI to sing? Of course not, we know it can't do it. But you can ask any story teller to sing - they might suck, but they can do it.

Second, we think there is no limit to how smart an AI can become. This is not true. This is because when you look at charts vs time, they look exponential - showing how each year the AI not only gets smarter but also gets more smarter than it did last year. Those charts so capability vs time but ignore the cost and hardware increases. In reality these charts are NOT showing AI advancements - they are showing Moore's Law.

Because of Moores law, each year we get exponentially better chips. But AI itself is not improving, it is the HARDWARE that is getting better - along with the money we spend on the AI. Hardware improvements affect speed, not capability. AI with better hardware is faster, but it can't really do more or give you better answers.

The honest truth is that all of AI's improvements in capability - the better answers- are entirely caused by HUMANS. The humans detect a problem - putting elephants in a room when told not to - and fix it. The humans realize that AI gives better answers when told to check it's results - so the AI is told to replace "What is the best political party to vote for" with "What are the problems with my answer to what is the best political party to vote for".

Consider how easy it is to write a book that has some of your knowledge, but impossible to write a book that has more knowledge than you have.

Similarly, it is extremely unlikely that a species can create an artificial intelligence that is actually smarter than the original species. How could we tell if we succeeded? If it answers a question we cannot answer - how would we know it is right? Because that is how we make AI better - we have it try a bunch of things and pick the one that we know works.

Third and most important, if we can create a super intelligent AI we will not create a single one of them. Instead we will create hundreds of them. There will be the prototype and the one made that fixes the first mistakes. There will be China, Russia, Japans, America, Germany, one. And Microsoft's, Googles, Amazons, etc.

And all those Super intelligent AI's will argue and fight among themselves.

We do not need to fear that Alcoa's AI will collect all the Aluminum to make Aluminum cans because 3M's AI will be stealing their Aluminum to make wind turbines, etc. etc. etc.