I'm in Seattle, which I gather is an outlier in how common masks are. In the grocery store and transit at off-peak times, I see maybe 10% of people wearing masks at most. They're there, but not common. The few times I've been on transit at peak times, it's been a clear majority wearing masks (mainly KN95s).

Of course, at events that require masks or at the doctor's office, I see 100% of people wearing masks, with a mix of N95s and KN95s and the occasional surgical mask.

Clicking through the links on the technical details, I found a link to the GitHub page for proton-bridge, so it is indeed open source. It sounds like it's a PGP key manager of sorts. It's not explicit, but it sounds like ProtonMail stores all of their users' PGP keys with the private keys encrypted with your password such that they never see your password so they can't decrypt the key. And the bridge just handles doing the key requests and encryption/decryption for any emails sent to/from other ProtonMail accounts.

It seems like if you were a more technical user and had an email client with PGP support, your email client should be able to just have a plugin for dealing with ProtonMail's key distribution and then you wouldn't need the bridge.

There's no income tax in Seattle or anywhere in Washington State. It's an ongoing political issue, with the latest being a capital gains tax on gains over $250k which may or may not get struck down by the courts or removed by a new voter initiative.

> The ARM reference design offers a guarantee that such side channels don't exist.

Nonsense. All modern CPUs have speculative execution side channels by nature. The only way to protect against these attacks is to change how we write software to insert speculation barriers in security-critical code paths.

The difference is that Intel doesn't just have speculative execution side channels, they had a pile of critical *security domain crossing* speculative execution side channels. All CPUs can leak data in speculation from your process into the side channel (which might be monitored by another process), but Intel has a pile of bugs which can leak data from *a completely different, innocent process*, or even the kernel (meltdown), or a VM hypervisor (L1TF). Those aren't inherent in CPU design, those are a result of what is clearly a major culture issue inside Intel.

> Spectre and Meltdown bed to differ.

Spectre and Meltdown are not covert channel issues. Spectre is a collection of speculative execution *side channel* issues, and Meltdown is a privilege domain crossing speculative execution *side channel* (the only one that hit other CPUs as well as Intel IIRC; other than Meltdown I think Intel has a monopoly on goofs this bad, e.g. L1TF). Covert channels are not the same thing as side channels, as they require cooperation from both sides.

While it does seem difficult to study, there actually is research on this by the UK: One dose of COVID-19 vaccine can cut household transmission by up to half.

Mobileye is not new. They have provided the tech behind the driving-assist technology in multiple makes of cars for over a decade, including originally doing Tesla's before Tesla dumped them in 2016. Of course, there's a big gap between driving-assist and full-self-driving and they may be over-promising like seems common in this space, but Mobileye isn't coming out of nowhere.

It's really hacky, but this script I developed does that by piping the phone's camera through a WebRTC connection made by using the mobile web browser, which connects to the desktop using gstreamer. It's pretty fiddly and doesn't actually work very well in practice, but it's at least a proof-of-concept that it's possible, without even needing to install an app on your phone past the web browser it already has.

This blog post from Derek Lowe discusses the requirements in more detail. Specifically, I think the following quote answers your question:

The RCP average shows that Biden was in the lead nearly the entire time. On October 7, 2019, at Warren's peak, she just barely edged into the lead for a single day. Other than that, Biden was always the favored moderate (i.e. non-Sanders) candidate.

I feel like people on Slashdot often complain every chat service is just re-inventing IRC. But adding voice/video chat that works in a web browser is legitimately a useful feature for a chat room system. And, they're silly, but people like emojis.

What would you propose as an alternative? Mumble and Matrix look like the closest alternatives I can find.

Mumble does not look user-friendly enough that I would be comfortable recommending it to non-techies. Among other problems, it doesn't appear to have a web interface and there is no official Android app, although it sounds like the unofficial one works fine. I'm fine with putting in some work to set up a server (see my sig: I'd much rather host my own chat server), but clients need to be easy enough to use that my friends won't give up and go back to Facebook Messenger (and accept that they have to find other workarounds to talk to anyone boycotting Facebook).

Matrix didn't work very well last time I tried (Android app crashed trying to make a simple voice call multiple times) but that was several months ago now. Hopefully it's better now? Maybe I should try again.

I do pay for Discord because I want them to keep being able to host their chat service. It certainly has issues, but it seems better than the alternatives for what I want out of it.

Some states do in fact require a notary for an absentee ballot, or, at least, used to. For example, Oklahoma does but they apparently recently added a COVID-19 exception. It looks like Missouri does as well. Looking at this list of all the states, it looks like no other state requires a notary, although some accept a notary in place of multiple witnesses (erm, unless I missed something skimming that list).

He's talking about the Motor Voter Act which directs DMVs to make it easy for people to register to vote when they get a state ID or driver's license. Of course, you have to attest that you're a citizen just like when you register to vote any other way.

And the list of people who are registered and who vote in each election is public, so if non-citizens voting were actually a thing that happened, it should be easy to find evidence of it. The fact that no one is putting forth anything other than vague insinuations to that effect suggests it's not actually a problem. This article from Time agrees.

That complaint is a new one to me. What are you talking about?

God bless Lili St. Cyr!

Serious? No. I don't seriously expect really safe speed limits to be set up by any democracy that has so many motorists in it. But I do think that's what we ought to do. As a civilisation, we are killing our own children at an appalling rate, just so that motorists can catch up to the back of the next long line of stationary traffic a few seconds faster. In town, slow down.

Look at the scenario you described. A car doing the speed limit towards a marked crosswalk... it's such a familiar scenario that we forget to be horrified. Think about what we're doing here. We have footpaths across the street specifically for people to walk across. And then we have motorists driving straight at those footpaths, at such speed that it would literally be a crime to go any faster at all, at such speed that they couldn't possibly stop should anyone suddenly walk out on the path. These motorists expect everyone else in the world to pay attention, to stay out of their way. God forbid they themselves should slow down! They're 'doing the limit' and that makes it OK.

That limit is obviously much too high. It should come down. Twenty is plenty.

Then let's redesign those footpaths. At the moment there are raised paths either side of the street, and when the path runs across the middle of the street it is lowered. For the convenience of motorists, of course; otherwise they might have to slow down. Well, let them slow down! The path across the street is a pedestrian walkway just like the paths either side, so let's have it at the same height, for the convenience of people using wheelchairs, people pushing infants in prams, people with mobility issues. We'll put a gentle slope to either side of the path so that it isn't a nasty bump for motor traffic. Well, I mean - so that it isn't a nasty bump if the motor traffic is moving at a safe speed.