It's appropriate for a Chess.com story given their app now has ads by sketchy, low-class companies

It's probably just encrypted, that provides the security-focused part of write protection, at least while it's not been unlocked for boot.

Computers used to have stuff in ROM, stuff used to be a lot smaller, you used to be able to burn your own ROMs and put them on your own boards and have it be meaningful. But none of that is true today of course any more than that you could put a useful amount of storage on a floppy.

Read/write protection on flash is mostly done in firmware and therefore could theoretically be bypassed, I wonder if there were floppy drives before LS120 where that was also true.

It seems like a better solution would be to virtualize the Windows installation in the first place, and then you can do whatever you want with it later if it's compromised. While IT is checking it over to determine whether it's time to revert it to a snapshot or actually try to gather data from it, you can be using an alternate system of whatever kind. The user ought to ideally be basically unaware that anything has happened (why would you boot into Linux when a user is used to Windows?) except that they don't have access to some files.

About county level voter suppression Trump is going to win the third term. If his health doesn't hold out it will be JD Vance and he will continue project 2025. Everyone will be very confused why that happened and they will continue to ignore the millions of Americans unable to vote because they have their voter registration challenged and didn't have a weekday afternoon to go down to the courthouse to fix that or maybe they couldn't wait in line for 3 hours to vote on election Day.

The problem is county level voter suppression is mostly done by a bunch of obnoxious grandmas and grandpas and we don't like to think about that let alone start jailing those motherfuckers like we need to. Take a few of those bastards and make them die in federal prison for the blatant crimes they're committing and yeah we'd start having some improvements but nobody really wants to think about that. It doesn't help that county level politics is just so mind-bogglingly boring. It's fun to talk about Trump ending mail and voting because it's this big bombastic thing that isn't actually going to happen at least not yet. But talking about some 60 year old sitting at their kitchen table with a laptop printing out letters to challenge voter registrations because he was ordered to by Peter thiel without realizing that who's giving him the orders is dull as dishwater and dear God talking to those people is incredibly insufferable. What are you even do with somebody who finds Fox News entertaining?

It is possible the American people will have a weird reaction to Trump running for a third term if he does but I'm not really expecting that because Trump's approval numbers are exactly where they were in the lead up to the 2024 election. His health might not hold out and we might get saved by JD Vance just blowing it because he's weird as fuck and fucks couches but realistically the Democrats do not have the killer instinct to take advantage of that and also if you pay any attention to that mother fucker JD Vance you can tell he's been taking acting lessons and getting ready and he knows that he is perceived as weird and off-putting and he is training himself to correct that. With enough time and effort anyone can learn those skills if they are sleazy enough and he sure is.

My point is 2029 is probably not going to save us. And that's before we get into the fact that the voters are inevitably going to put the Republicans in charge in 2030 because swing voters are dumb as shit.

About 7 million Americans were prevented from voting in 2024 by common voter suppression tactics like illegal challenges to voter registrations and multi-hour wait times to vote in blue leaning districts. If you're not sure what blue it means it refers to the color of our Center left party the Democrats.

Without that voter suppression Donald Trump would not be president and the Republican party would be a minority party. If you mix in the effects of gerrymandering and how it benefits the Republican party the Republican party today wouldn't even exist.

We are a failing democracy and the rest of the world is standing by watching us fail. Which given the size of our military and our industrial capacity and our ability to ramp it up is probably a really bad idea. We may not have the generals the Germany had in the 1940s but we have many many times more the industrial capacity and we are openly talking about taking over Canada and Mexico and Greenland even...

The rest of the world needs to stop dismissing this as jokes or worse thinking that they can take advantage of it and get themselves some trillionaires. And I don't think anyone wants to hear that because I don't think anyone wants to think about how insanely dangerous an out of control America with nothing to lose and a massive desperate population is going to be...

Folks need to understand that we are crazy. Canada especially needs to understand that you're not even a nuclear power and we are openly talking about invasion. And I don't mean a few cranks and crackpots. And Greenland is clearly what these people are planning on using to launch a full scale invasion of europe. And I cannot emphasize this enough we do not care that you have nuclear weapons we are insane and we believe God will protect us.

But hey maybe the Loonie can take over the US dollar as the world's de facto currency for oil purchases. That's worth risking global Armageddon for I guess...

Billionaires have captured American schools. They've been spending a shitload of money to take over the school boards. There have actually been several cases where they went too far and they elected people who are just too fucking crazy and they lost after a few semesters of them doing their crazy shit.

Peter thiel and Elon Musk want a remake human civilization in their image and they're both absolutely fucking crazy and we all know it. But because they're kind of weird looking us nerds have a sort of kinship with them as the guys who made good. Kind of like how the Italian mob shows up at your business and breaks everything and makes you pay protection money but you're still looking up to the Don. Only much much stupider because both of those men are idiots who just blundered into a bunch of money

Debian is four things besides contributors: Governance/COC, license, code, and a network of repos. Debian's code is a tiny amount compared to the overall distribution, but code is not a trivial percentage of Debian.

I'd like to see them be resistant to AI contributions to the code that makes up Debian, I don't care as much if AI is used to do packaging. That's probably a place it could succeed, especially since Debian uses systemd and there will already be unit files which just need paths corrected in predictable ways... and which I will read before bashing init scripts out of other init scripts in five minutes or so.

s/u/i/

Fluid bed pyrolysis isn't profitable, but it is close enough to be viable. If recycling were meaningfully mandated (hahaha etc I know) then it could certainly be done without making plastics outrageously expensive.

On one hand, good luck to us if we try to make that happen, but on the other hand we are not realistically going to stop using fuel or plastics any time soon, the two go hand in hand anyway, and looking the other way accomplishes nothing.

The newer controls are more affordable. In the case of the non-button "buttons" a chip and some megaohm resistors and a piece of plastic with some labels screen printed on it replace a whole bunch of custom-designed injection-molded buttons with special labels which have to be applied with sub-millimeter accuracy, and switches for them which have to be able to survive hundreds of thousands of cycles in an extreme temperature environment. Only in the most basic vehicles which still have manual climate controls, if such a thing even exists any more, are the buttons potentially cheaper because they are attached directly to functions.

I had an A8 Quattro. It was a fairly marvelous driving machine when it was working well enough for that, but it was a horribly overcomplicated rolling nightmare when it comes to system design. It had a vacuum system about as stupid as the one on the infamous 300ZX TT and the electrical system had a truly peerless level of unneeded complexity designed apparently only to make the vehicle easier to assemble. There was a sealed-ish plastic "e-box" containing the principal control units and a bunch of junction plugs which then connected through to a related box inside in the center console, into which interior harness components would plug. This is unnecessary and only adds a lot of cost and points of failure. Put the fucking computers inside the cabin where they belong (because as hostile as environment as it can be, it's still less so than the engine bay) and you don't need any of this bullshit. Even Nissan got (and gets) that one right.

The Germans know how to make an amazing vehicle, but they are today apparently uninterested in making it reliable. Maybe Porsche is better, I can't speak to that brand.

Yes, you need the windows to do that to get a good seal when the doors are frameless. It is not strictly necessary, but it reduces wind noise.

People only think there's something special about BMW or Mercedes because they have not worked on cars. Once you have worked on a couple dozen different vehicles and gotten to know how they are put together you realize there is nothing at all special about modern BMWs or Mercedes compared to other modern cars. After the Lexus LS ate their luxury car lunch they all have been relentless cost cutters, but even before that they were starting to worsen the value proposition and depend on their logos and interiors to sell cars. The interiors matter, but if the underpinnings aren't as special as they are, they also aren't sufficient.

The Japanese figured out much better ways to design and build cars than the Germans, and it has showed since the nineties, and it still shows today. German cars are overwrought, with unnecessary complexities in basic components like electrical harnesses which cause more problems than they're worth, instead of overbuilt like they were in the 80s. This isn't even so much about mass because the W126 wasn't very heavy at all, it's about design iteration and spending money perfecting parts and systems. They don't even care about mass any more except for the most special or most budget cars, everything else is now heavy AF.

Cars last longer because of engineering competition to drive quality in vehicle design and assembly.

The ODB2 standard congealed a lot of emissions hassle, and ultimately forced prolonging service life in many product lines.

Although many shade tree mechanics of an older era are gone, there are many new ones that mod their cars, or simply repair them without the need of expensive dealer service costs; this is also part of the Right To Repair movement, where secret sauces hidden in the CANBUS. connected, multi-system firmware present in most cars.

Hackers have figured out what's what for many models.

And while convenience features are nice, any engineer will tell you that more features means more things that can go wrong. Owning some vehicles is like death-by-a-thousand-cuts as desired features slowly decay. Common parts become rarer and rarer.

The no-button approach also means a single point of failure-- the all-important console.Features become combines, all in a race to the bottom.

Increasing compliance costs and the need for profitability push car makers to make unwise choices. Button-based vehicles required ten seconds of familiarity to drive safely. Console-based devices require far more, and also cause visual distractions instead of intuitive look-and-feel controls.

It's just not as simple as you describe. Worse, international-market focused vehicle makers, especially the Europeans, make a center console because they must adapt to a left of right side steering basis-- it's cheaper just to build holes in the chassis and move the steering column left or right, thus not having two different dashboards and assemblies.

Consumers will choose among the offerings that suit them. The auto industry used to use specs to drive vehicle sales. Now, the motives and marketing are lifestyle-appeals.

German cars aren't special since the nineties. The last time they overbuilt them was in the eighties. The W126 Mercedes was the last great S class. The W140 was a rolling electrical failure. Well, sometimes it rolled anyway. BMW followed exactly the same trajectory. They had to learn to complete with the Japanese after the LS.

And each time it was clearly the wrong one.

Taxes do not depress the economy. They only are an issue when you have a kekistocracy like we do right now so that a massively disproportionate amount of the value of your taxpayer dollars is going to a handful of psychopathic billionaire Epstein Island attendees.

But otherwise no that's not how that works. You still need roads and schools and police and fire departments and you need regulations to make sure that the shit people sell you is safe because it won't be if they don't face consequences for selling you unsafe shit and you need research done that takes decades to pay off that no large corporation is going to pay for.

You also need social systems that prevent people who are unfit for work from becoming desperate and violent.

And finally you're stuck with the government whether you like it or not because if you don't create one and fund it then the billionaires will making you pay for it and then they'll take everything from you which is what they're in the process of doing right now. I mean for fuck sakes just go look into how SpaceX is basically a scam to steal all of our retirement savings...

You are thinking and acting like a 12-year-old and it needs to stop. If you're on this site you're smarter than that. You need to stop indulging yourself.