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Comment Recidivism rates (Score 1) 97

US: 66% (Wall Street's numbers aren't those found in official statistics)
UK: 28.9%
Holland: 23%
Norway: 16%
China: 6%

US' conclusion: The rate is a complete mystery, we've no idea how to decrease it, let's do more of what we're currently doing differently to everyone else.

There is a slight possibility this may be flawed.

Submission + - Bypass the polirical parties, add a new feedback to Congress (taxnvote.org)

SysEngineer writes: How would you change the US Federal budget? TaxNVote.org allows you to adjust 9 or 1000 categories of the next federal budget. The default form shows nine top-level categories (Defense, VA, Education, Health, Infrastructure, Science, Environment, DHS, Other); expand any line and you can allocate down to individual federal accounts — NASA, the National Park Service, specific research agencies, anything Congress votes on. Takes about five minutes at the top level, longer if you want the detail.

Tax N Vote (TNV) is a proposal to add a new feedback channel to the federal budget process. At tax filing each year, every taxpayer optionally submits a Tax Dollar — one person, one allocation. The IRS anonymizes submissions; the Census Bureau processes and stores them (where you can verify your own); the CBO aggregates one-person-one-vote between April 16 and May 1 and publishes "The People's Budget." A third reference point alongside the two party platforms — measurable, granular, and updated annually. Congress is not bound by it; what changes is that deviations from constituent preferences become documented, attributable, and electorally citable. The argument is system-dynamics, not partisan: changing the color of the players doesn't change the system. A simulation of the mechanism shows convergence toward whatever the People's Budget turns out to be, in both ideological directions tested. There will be a talk on the model at ISDC 2026 in Delft.

The Government-side processing of Tax Dollar documents is written in Rust — memory safety and predictable performance for government data handling. The browser-side allocation engine is a Rust WASM module inside a Vue frontend, so the math you see in the app is the same math the aggregator uses. Processing is divided across agencies that already exist; marginal cost to the government is less than renaming the Department of War.

Open source end to end. The Tax Dollar format is open, the reference implementation is at github.com/greenpdx/TaxNVote26, and anyone can build their own client, audit the aggregator, or publish pre-filled template budgets that citizens adopt with one click. Go build a budget: TaxNVote.org.

Comment Once the console's servers are shut down (Score 1) 128

Developers can make the license whatever they want including on consoles.

Not once the console maker shuts down the platform's reactivation servers.

Or say the publisher wants to publish a multiplayer game where players 2 through 4 can download a limited-functionality version of the game without charge so long as player 1 is a paying licensee and on their mutual contacts list. This resembles the model used by StarCraft spawned installations, single-Pak multiplayer on Game Boy Advance, and DS Download Play on Nintendo DS. I don't think all consoles support this sort of game sharing.

Comment Re:Two statutory carveouts: first sale and RAM cop (Score 1) 128

Which is not an ownership issue, it's a DRM/license enforcement issue.

Correct. The digital restrictions management regime on paid downloads from PlayStation Store doesn't grant rights to a licensee that are equivalent to those that the law reserves for the owner of a copy. The complaint, as I understand it, is that the required notice of inequivalence is not conspicuous enough.

The plaintiffs can still get the same benefits of the product even if their purchase is just for a license.

The benefits are not the same if the publisher or the platform gatekeeper retains the ability to remotely disable licensed software.

Comment Re:What does someone think "owning" a game would m (Score 1) 128

The only thing you really lose is the ability to resell your license easily.

Or, in the case of certain failure modes of PlayStation Store (such as end of support for a particular platform), the ability to restore your license to replacement hardware.

Comment Re:On AI design and also irony (Score 1) 55

It has seemed to me, for a very long time, that modern AI systems would need to be integrated with standard RDBMS systems for reliable persistant storage of raw information, some sort of no-sql database (memcache or some variant) for persistant storage of associations, some sort of document database for blocks of textual information, a SPARQL system for searching semantically-marked information within the document database, and a more old-fashioned back-propogation NN to provide a store of understanding that the user can directly manipulate.

Probabalistic classifiers are all fine and good, but only for a subset of the tasks needed. The above structure is a very loose, wildly-speculative initial framework. It's almost certain that if you actually tried building an integrated multi-model system, that you'd end up making a lot of changes to this basic idea, but that you'd end up having to implement the same core concepts that are identified in it.

Comment Re:"Alan Turing, one of the more famous people" (Score 1) 24

From their careful selection of text, they WANTED it to mean something else so badly that they couldn't handle putting in the full text. It's a common blight on today's Internet, where people want other people's writings to mean something other than what was meant by the writer, so carefully select the words they read.

Comment Re:That's 12-year-old thinking (Score 1) 56

That's the entire point. Trying to solve other people's problems NEVER WORKS. You CANNOT control others into responsible behaviour, but you CAN place them in a position where they will choose to be responsible of their own accord. It is the ONLY way that works. It is the only way that has ever worked. If you look at computer programming, you will see this repeated over and over - well-meaning "hard rules" are ignored, STANDARDS are kept.

You must give them parameters and force them to find their own solution within those.

Comment Re:revocable (Score 1) 128

Narrowing:
1. The right answer in the case of games with a substantial offline experience is to not make the license for the offline portion revocable.
2. The right answer in the case of games without a substantial offline experience is to describe the license as a rental at all times.

Comment Re:revocable (Score 1) 128

All three major console makers require all customers to "agree[] to let them change the terms when you signed up." If a game developer wants to sell a customer an indefinite license that the console maker can't revoke, the developer has no way to do so. This appears to be evidence of a cartel to me. How is it not?

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