These days you can't get very far trying to convince people to vote for your team. The sides are already locked in. You can get somewhere by asking people for specifics, such as when they say, "Candidate X is [some generally negative thing here]", you can just ask them to name one specific example of it, and they typically won't be able to. That's enough to make them stop and at least think.

But flooding social media with AI generated crap? Yeah, good luck with that.

Some very good ideas in there, with just one exception.

- "Watermarked ballots": Already being done if using scantron ballots. In fact, scanner can be physically set to accept only special ballot paper.
- "All ballots hand-counted": Terrible idea. Humans are lousy at counting repetitively. Scantron is thousands of times more accurate.
- "Mail-in by exception only": Excellent idea. Even further, mail-in only if voter will not be physically present.
- "Mail-in received and counted before election day": Yes, very good.
- "Mail-in must be witnessed, both provide image of ID": Yes, very good.

I am willing to pay a fair price for the content I consume, just as I do for everything else I purchase. What I am not willing to do is trade my time. They say time is money, but that's not correct; time is much more valuable than money. You can always make more money. You can never make more time.

What I now require is the ability to purchase access to your content without advertisements. No ad-free option, no subscription.

We have licensing firms that already provide blanket global licenses for specific reproductions of content such as lyrics and music. If there were an ad-free licensing agency where I could pay a fee that would be distributed to content creators globally, I would buy into that. There's no reason we have to rely on Alphabet or Meta to handle such licensing tracking. In the music world, this is handled by third parties, which provides some independence and audibility.

But in the meantime, each content platform will have to provide consumers like me an ad-free route if they wish to remain profitable.

No. There are no countries like that. Because TNSTAAFL

This makes no sense. Citation neded.

Everything the artists are saying about not diluting the experience of listening to actual musicians applies 100% to the current trend of "correcting" vocal performances with auto-tuning, pitch correction, and especially not with playing back a recorded vocal, and having the singer mime singing it "live". That hardly qualifies as live!

Because as everyone knows, the purpose of sleep is to do GC, and when that is needed you must of course shut down all input, all output except fan noise, and terminate all running applications. Obviously.

No, the browser is one of the app layers on a Chromebook, not its OS services layer.

Please go and actually use a Chromebook. It's a Linux distribution that uses the web browser as just one of several application environments. In addition to the web environment, it supports containers for Andoid, Linux, and Windows apps, and integrates them all under one desktop manager, perfectly seamlessly.

Do not buy an underpowered machine and expect ChromeOS to somehow make up the difference and let you run apps with an acceptable level of performance. You will hate running ChromeOS on a slow machine just as much as you would hate running Windows. Spend enough money on hardware that will last the full 10 years of support. Get a fast CPU. Web apps are especially susceptible to memory bloat, so do not skimp on RAM. You will not need a large local disk for the OS. Buy storage based on your app usage only. A 2-in-1 form factor is a game changer for many work flows. I will never go back to a normal clamshell design.

I have ChromeOS, Android, and Linux all installed on my Chromebook, and I use apps running on all three environments everyday. They've done a very good job integrating the desktop environment, you'd never know you were running on different hosts.

I have never had to do a manual install of a ChromeOS update. All updates are automatic, and most do require a restart, but I've never had work interrupted because of an update. I have had to do manual updates of the Linux container. ChromeOS attempts to keep this updated, but only about 1 in 3 updates can be done automatically. As every Linux user knows, you can't avoid having to jump in and fix up a dependency.

On the big selling points of ChromeOS -- you have to learn only one UI, all the hardware just works, updates are automatic, local storage is just a cache of your cloud accounts so you can literally switch entire machines in a manner of minutes -- they've done an outstanding job, in my opinion. This is as close to set-it-and-forget-it as it gets. Much better than an Apple laptop in that regard, and miles better than a Windows laptop.

Julliard has a nice write-up on Bach's temperament: https://journal.juilliard.edu/...