No, Texas can (maybe) legally split into up to five new states as long as one is still named Texas (assuming its original admission terms from 1845 still apply and weren't superseded by the terms of its readmission in 1870). Neither it nor its hypothetical child states can legally secede. https://www.smithsonianmag.com...

"Publishers have always controlled how their content is made available to Google as AI models have been built into Search for many years, helping surface relevant sites and driving traffic to them. This document is an early-stage list of options in an evolving space and doesn't reflect feasibility or actual decisions." Right, except that that "choice" is "feed the AI Overview, or don't get indexed": https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/bu... Now, it's Google's service and within the law, they can run it however they want. But don't tell me about how much choice publishers have when the choice is as stark as that.

The reason for those originally was it was how you made a box with old typewriters. The reason you still see it is that law firms and the legal profession generally are still one of the most hidebound, "we've always done it that way so we always *will* do it that way" types of employers on the planet. I used to work at a Kinko's (2002-2004) and law firms were the only ones we regularly got WordPerfect documents from. Why? Because the templates they used for filings were all created in WordPerfect 20 years ago and they were still using them and had no plans to change because no lawyer wanted to get yelled at in open court by a judge for filing a brief with the wrong margins or something. It was honestly a miracle most of them were bringing us WordPerfect and not a pile of typewritten originals. They all had very specific binding and covering instructions too, because the court mandated every detail from font size and margins to the paper type and color of the cover on each copy.

Wouldn't work. LLMs have no true concept of meaning -- they don't know what the text of regulation Foo *intends*, or how to express a given intent as a block of code. At best they can extrapolate from, say, having seen training data where similar blocks of text were associated with blocks of code that have some patterns in common, and regurgitate based on that -- but that training data might well have been an example of why the given block of code *doesn't* properly implement the regulatory language, or it might have just been incorrectly asserted to do so, or a hundred other things that mean what the LLM spits out may compile, but still won't be correct. (And it may not compile in the first place, because again, LLMs have no actual concept of meaning or syntax, just patterns they see in their training data.)

It doesn't have to be perfect, just better than what this is, and it is. I put my TLS certificate in my DNS zone with a TLSA record, then sign my zone with my known, published DNSSEC key. Only I can sign my zone with that key and the chain of trust extends from the root of the DNS down to my signed records -- just like the current highly-centralized CA system, except history suggests publishing a malicious DNSSEC key for my domain is a lot harder than getting one of a couple of hundred CAs of varying trustworthiness to issue a certificate for my domain. DANE is a technical measure against malicious activity, where things like this and CAA records are mere administrative advice to authorities -- if you are a CA abiding by CA/B Forum rules, you must not issue a certificate if things don't match up, but nothing actually *stops* you from doing so. DANE is vulnerable to key compromise, but so are DNSSEC and the CA system (in both cases, if I get your private key associated with an issued cert or published public key, I then have everything I need to impersonate you). Another way to look at it is that to guard against the most common subversions of the CA system, you need DNSSEC anyway (to prevent cache poisoning attacks that redirect requests to a malicious site with a compromised or stolen cert). But if you *have* DNSSEC, you can just directly publish your TLS key and take advantage of the already-established chain of trust instead of needing to involve a rent-seeking third party.* * Except that browsers don't support it even though both OpenSSL and GnuTLS do, so just using DANE doesn't provide any security or authentication of your identity for the vast majority of web users today.

The problem is that we all just go along with the idea that a couple of hundred "authorities" chosen by a small cadre of mostly profit-seeking entities are ultimately-trusted by default to issue any certificate for any domain. There are already methods like DANE for authenticating a cryptographic key as belonging to an identified domain registrant that make CAs basically unnecessary in the vast majority of cases -- but your browser doesn't support them because it's overwhelmingly likely that your browser is Chrome, and Chrome doesn't (and won't, judging by history) support anything but the status quo on this, so there's little incentive for other browser makers to do so either.

The public statements are exactly the kind of thing some insecure executive who takes personal offense (for whatever reason, not necessarily because they're personally called out) demands be said - I've seen it from the inside of a few employers over the years. I guarantee you the people inside Facebook whose actual job is crisis communications in situations like this are pulling their hair out because they know this is the worst possible response (and are being overridden), unless they're just incompetent at their jobs.

I have a Fedora install on my main personal laptop and recently I ran into an issue where VS Code complained it couldn't run a Kubernetes plugin because `kubectl` was not in the user's PATH. But I knew it *was* in my path because I use `kubectl` in the shell myself, quite often. Turns out VS Code was installed from a Flatpak; removing the Flatpak install and switching over to installing from the "deprecated" RPMs (from RPMFusion, I think) resolved the issue completely. Quite likely I could have resolved it with some sort of configuration change to the Flatpak, but honestly, I just didn't find it worthwhile to spend the time, as experience tells me it would likely become a train of constantly tweaking the Flatpak config to make it work with one more thing it would just work with in the first place if installed the usual way. The isolation the Flatpak system imposes was the problem, not a solution.

The consequences of the big government's War on Fat will be felt for generations. The loving and caring lesser governments even went so far as to outright banning butter in public schools...

Libertarians hate being proven right...

USSR — and then Russia — were/are the supporters and often outright instigators of most of the world's terrorism and other evil.

All efforts should be aimed on defeating that first and foremost.

If the Ukrainians are on the tip of that spear today, they must not lack for weapons, supplies, nor other support.

And you represent the essence of neo-feudalism where my bank account is the sole determiner of my worth to society and those poor's should just die more efficiently to pave the way for the glorious ubermensch to rule the masses.

You libertarian types

There is nothing — zero — in the Libertarian doctrine, that mentions anything anywhere near the strawman you attributed to me. Indeed, your verbiage is straight out of the most infamous (though not the most evil) Statist of all L-)

Live on a different planet. Go live where you are alone and die well there.

This is an interesting attitude — considering, that Libertarians don't at all mind other people organizing themselves into any kind of Collectives they genuinely want to. A Libertarian government wouldn't touch you — as long you don't coerce anyone to join you.

It is the other way around, that is impossible — Statists wouldn't leave the Libertarians be. So, if anyone ought to be exiled to a different planet, it is you — the oppressors — not us...

Yeah it looks like Putin is going to be your new best buddy.

On the contrary, that is quite less likely now, that we've avoided Obama's fourth term.

Baltic nations said this week they are investigating whether the cutting of two fiber-optic undersea telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea was sabotage.

Of course, it was. We even know, who the saboteurs are.

Though the collective "Biden" may not realize it, Russia's been at war with the West for many years... They started it, and we ought to end it — on our terms.

I knew, I could count on you to refill my mug any time it runneth empty. Not that there is any danger of that at the moment :-)

Have fun applying for a new job at 50. Especially after the gut the labor board and age discrimination is legal.

This quote represents the very essence of Statism. It openly admits, that government needs to — indeed, must — maintain and enforce rules, which would compel people to hire those, whom they don't want to hire.

It is quite funny, that these are the same Statists, who are trying to scare us, that it is the other side, that "threaten our freedoms"...