It is not enforceable in the abstract sense - people can write their own encryption software at any time of course.

But it is very enforceable in the practical sense for about 99% of the population. First, the number of people who can write secure encryption apps is small. Even using standard algorithms and toolkits it is very difficult to implement securely end to end, especially if you have to assume your adversary has physical access to the device (i.e. a phone confiscated in an arrest). I don't find it at all unlikely that with a phone in their possession the police were able to break this particular app.

Distribution of the app is the more practical challenge. Get secure encryption banned/regulated, and it disappears from the Google and Apple app stores, disappears from github and other repositories, etc. That alone makes it inaccessible to anyone that isn't working hard to get it, since you need to jailbreak a phone and find something on the dark web. Not an effective deterrent to someone willing to put in the time and effort, but it ups the degree of difficulty significantly, and a bunch of the people who need that level of security will never take the time to track it down.

Obviously an issue, but I expect that as existing gas stations see their revenue drop as EVs eat into ICE numbers they will have an incentive to provide electric charging as well.

And the total number of stations can be significantly lower, since most of the charging can happen at home or work. Charging networks are needed mostly for road trips.

It is really not nearly that clear cut. If MS fixes a bug that you happened to be relying on, do you have a cause of action against them? If they don't remove flash because you depend on it, do others that encounter security issues because of it have a cause of action against MS for not removing it? If MS fixes a bug in Paint that makes the binary bigger, and your disk fills up and your system crashes, do you have a cause of action?

If you say that MS is not allowed to update/alter the product at all after it is released, fine. But that view is the Internet equivalent of being an anti-vaxxer. If products don't get updated, malware will spread like wildfire. Kind of like a virus in an unvaccinated population.

One of the more shocking factoids I saw about this crisis is that the power demand was only abnormal for winter. I am going from memory so the figures are only roughly correct, but the load they needed to deliver was approximately 60GW I believe, and a heat wave in the summer needs more like 150GW (article on arstechnica.com I can no longer lay my hands on). Winter is when power plants go offline for maintenance in Texas, since the demand drops relative to summer. Between that and equipment that wasn't capable of operating in the cold temps, they got caught short.

So I would call this a planning failure.

Except that they couldn't create an account on a computer and then access it on their mobile, without manually entering the password the first time, or anytime the password is changed. Which is taking away much of the value of the app.

At the very least? I think requiring vaccination evidence to fly is the most I can imagine. Maybe require evidence of vaccination or a negative test upon entry to the country, without restrictions on domestic flights. But I can't picture needing vaccination records to get on a commuter train.

I am sympathetic to the concept, but there are significant real world challenges to doing this. EVs tend to get the batteries as low as possible, to keep the center of gravity low. The longer the range, the bigger the battery pack, and the more likely it is to have oddly shaped components that fit in little nooks and crannies. Easily swappable batteries probably implies a small number of common size battery modules, meaning either range suffers or the battery compartment intrudes into the passenger/cargo space.

In many ways this is equivalent to asking that all phones have interchangeable batteries, except you are dealing with hundreds of pounds of batteries rather than an ounce or two.

Large amounts of data make physical transport of media attractive, though with bandwidth increases on the internet the threshold where it makes sense is continually being raised. In the radiology world, hospitals and other large radiology practices switch their image archive systems (PACS) every now and then, and migration of multiple petabytes of data from one system to another frequently takes months. Though in that case the ingestion and parsing of the data into a new PACS system is the limiting factor, not copy bandwidth.

But anything in the petabyte or exabyte range is big and takes a long time. Not at all surprising that something like the Snowmobile is attractive. And in most cases I think it is attractive because of the capacity, with security as a nice bonus.

Interesting. But how much of the traffic stays within the continent? Aside from local searches like a a local business, I would assume big operators host lots of content locally, meaning lots of traffic never leaves the country.

I hear that narrative quite a bit - that the polls are intentionally wrong, that they are trying to shape the race, not measure it. If that is the case, then why is that:

1. The swing states seem universally agreed on - Biden and Trump are campaigning in the same few states, and all the ones that the polls identify as the closest. Do the polling firms have a secret lair somewhere where they all agree on how they will lie to the world? And if they are lying, why are the candidates behaving as if the polls are correct?
2. Why does a campaign never dispute public polls with their own internal polling? I can't think of any national campaign offering details of their internal polls as a way to refute what they perceive to be biased polls. I see campaigns ignoring polling data, or saying something like "you will see who is right on election day", but I can't think of a specific refutation of the form "you used a biased sample with too many x and too few y", where somebody could judge for themselves.
3. Public polling is usually paid for by news media, and there is a competitive advantage to calling the election properly. They have a profit motive to be right. And the same polling firms that do public polls do private ones, where presumably the campaign wants the real data. Doesn't their reputation suffer if they present intentionally biased polls as objective?
4. Conservative (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, etc.) outlets report basically the same polling data as mainstream (ABC/CBS/NBC) and liberal (CNN, MSNBC) outlets. If the polls are intentionally dishonest, why doesn't each source commission their own polls in their own dishonest way? They may highlight a poll that is better or worse for their candidate, but even the Fox News polls show Trump behind, and they are unquestionably in his corner.

The polls may indeed be wrong. There may be a systemic error that swings the national average to Biden or Trump. There are almost certainly local factors that have been overlooked that make the state polls less accurate than national polls. But nothing I have seen makes me think the pollsters are not trying to be correct.

I have to admit that I am not terribly bothered by cops being able to break into a phone that they have physical possession of. That requires some level of effort for every individual phone. Just like cops can follow somebody around, but it takes a significant amount of labor to do so.

The scary thing is if they can do it without requiring possession, or if the process becomes so trivial that every time you have an encounter with the police (traffic ticket, etc.) they break into your phone as a matter of course.

So long as it remains an arms race between the vendors and the authorities, I am not too worried.

And as evidence that it won't make any difference, I offer the observation that every gas pump (at least in my state but I think all across the US) does have a sticker showing how much federal and state taxes are per gallon

I don't know the specifics of this case, but in general large cities and large corporations self insure for a lot of things like that. You have insurance for things you can't afford to have happen. Big cities can afford to budget for replacing police cars now and then, so likely it is coming out of the taxpayers.

Not sure what the cultural of Sweden vs. the US has to do with death rates, but I would note that you are talking about how the score is tied in the second inning of a baseball game. This thing isn't over by any means.

And maybe we will look back and say that all the social distancing and lockdowns were unnecessary. In a situation where data is lacking you have to make the best decisions you can, based on what you know and can project. Despite the conspiracy theories out there, I accept that the governors and other local authorities that imposed shutdowns were acting with good intentions for their constituents.

On a 60% full flight you can get every other seat empty, but you still have adjacent rows occupied, so at a budget airline seat pitch of something like 33 inches, that is the distance from my head to the person in front of me. And at something like 21 inch lateral seat pitch, even with an empty seat or aisle, I am still not getting to the typical social distancing target of 72 inches away from people. To do that you would need at least every other seat and every other row empty, giving you a load factor of something more like 30% (3 seats out of 5 in one row, 0 out of 5 the next).