I do not know whether predestination plays a role, but wanting to damn people for all eternity (or at least the rest of their natural lives) is a common theme with religious fanatics.

Yes. The claims they want less recidivism are simply lies. It is known how to get these rates down. It is well-known that positive reinforcement works a lot better than negative. It is known that making it easy for people to reintegrate into society, most will go for it. But they want to be "tough on crime". That is denial of reality and that never gives you good outcomes.

On the plus-side, large prison populations are good for keeping our citizens in fear and laws that criminalize everything and anything allows you to get rid of inconvenient people easily. Of course, the rich and powerful almost never have any of those enforced against them, no matter what despicable and repulsive things they do.

Indeed. As is creating criminals. Hence school-to-prison pipelines and other utter evil.

And in the Soviet Union everybody knew many of these were not real criminals ...

Indeed. But the religious fundamentalists want people to be damned forever (!) and hence that is the prevalent sentiment in the US. Guess what, people that get no chance to reintegrate into society do not do so. Also makes for a nice "us vs. them" world-view, something the fundamentalists absolutely love.

The potential is there, but I do not think it will happen. Respective research would find out things that are massively unwanted by the rich and powerful. Just think about research into the mindset of malignant narcissists and you should immediately see what I mean. Or the (very solid) results that conservatives are dumber than liberals. Or that most people cannot fact-check. Or the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Bottom line is that we already know a lot, it is just not used because society and the leaders it choses are not rational. Expanding that knowledge is not desired by too many people.

I do not think there are mysterious cases. There are just some where people chose not to cooperate enough for us to make a determination and that is their right.

Also note that there are quite a few "too important to jail" cases, see, for example some prominent stock scammers or rapists and child abusers or murderers/war criminals. These cases are probably the worst, because they give not-smart people the impression that you can get away with it. And hence overall ethics decline.

Your problem starts here. Right to privacy is a human right, and these were established as response to the 3rd Reich catastrophe. One characteristic is that you cannot lose a human right, regardless of what you do. It can be temporarily restricted if another thing has priority, but it cannot be removed. Hence people like you are into violating human rights and as soon as that starts to be a general sentiment, a state/group/organization is on a very dark path. Yes, you may be able to get some statistic to look better this way. But you have lost something far more valuable.

It's all up in the air now. Starmer resigned, and it looks like Burnham will run unopposed. He may keep the social media ban, as that has happened in other countries and seems to be reasonably popular and sensible. Should extend it to over 65s as well.

But the VPN ban I can see being walked back quickly as unworkable and unpopular. A pointless fight to have before the social media ban has even been tested.

I do remember that, but the counter argument which seemed persuasive was that the simplifications to the init system and other apps (not just GNOME) was compelling.

And don't they all use systemd? They must have a good reason for it.

Yeah, but to facilitate you continuing to use your familiar commands, the maintainers of the distro have to forego the convenience of systemd. Clearly it offers a lot to them, which is why the vast majority adopted it.

Is there any info on how this location tracking would work? GPS isn't going to cut it, it needs a battery and world wide cellular/satellite connection to track things being shipped, and once installed will be in a Faraday cage (the server enclosure/rack/datacentre).

Are they going to rely on it detecting when it is in a Chinese server somehow? Try to get an external IP address? Something in the driver?

It seems doomed to fail and easily bypassed. I'm sure it will spur further investment in Chinese AI chip manufacturing too, which is already progressing at a very rapid pace.

UTF-8 was a mistake. I get that they wanted to make string handling with existing code as painless as possible, and for most Latin derived languages a 32 bit char is approaching 75% wasted space, but the issues introduced by UTF-8 are far worse. UTF-16 doesn't have enough code points. You could argue for 24 bit.

Cylindrical cells are not the future though, they are older tech and have proven to be largely inferior to prismatic and blade batteries. Prismatic cells for lower cost and higher energy density, blade batteries for extreme performance. Tesla is using older chemistry too.