The point was that "republic" simply means "not a monarchy". The state is a "public thing/matter", not a private concern.

The grid has been forced to change faster than the operator would have liked it to in many places, which is a good thing.

In the main, although the Spanish national blackout just over a year ago suggests that maybe it changed too fast. (Hard to use a stronger word than "maybe" because my understanding is that the report on the causes didn't really say anything).

We are a republic for this reason.

No, you are a republic because your founding fathers, probably ascribing James III more power than he really had as a post-Glorious Revolution monarch, decided that head of state should not be a hereditary position.

Whitespace is a HUMAN affordance for a HUMAN audience. If you think it looks kinda okay, that's all that's needed.

There's a bit more to it than that: consistent whitespace means that version control diffs contain relevant changes and you don't need to filter out the changes that just remove some spaces from the end of a line. This is also really a human affordance, but while there are humans in the loop either approving changes or needing to understand when something changed, it's a valuable one. And there's a general principle here which is directly relevant to LLM-generated code, which is that until LLMs have minimising the diffs as part of their goals they're going to produce diffs which take a lot of effort for humans to review.

"Where are my engines Tory?!!"

"One's over in the swamp over there and one's over that-a-way on the beach."


Didn't they blow up a second stage during testing a few weeks ago? Two KABOOMS in such close succession?!!

No, the law of large numbers says that if you take lots of samples then the sample average will be very close to the underlying expected value, but it doesn't say that the underlying expected value of a binary valued random variable must be 0.5. To take a simple, albeit obviously pessimising, example, if we take two truly random uniform bit generators then we can combine them with bitwise AND to get a truly random bit generator with expected value 0.25.

Truly random doesn't necessarily imply a uniform distribution.

There's plenty of corruption in Spanish politics, but it doesn't work by direct open donation. If a direct donation is made, it's in secret in a brown envelope. Alternatively, companies with a viewpoint to push might hire a company with connections to a politician to, say, produce and run their stand in an industry expo at a very generous rate.

This is tantamount to misinformation. The regime cut the Internet on January 8th. It was *never* turned back on for the general public. Iran started allowing some country-wide intranet only, with heavy censorship and *no* outbound communication (except for regime figures). There has been no way to communicate with people in Iran anytime since except (a) Starlink (illegal, extremely risky, and subject to jamming) (b) outbound telephone calls (monitored).

Because it started January 8th, it is clear the initial purpose is very different than this states. The protests themselves started in late December. The internet blackout corresponds with nothing else but the regime crackdown in which they murdered tens of thousands of Iranian civilians. The obvious main purpose has been to keep Iranians from sharing about the atrocities.

Is the war related? Of course. It has become only more important as Iran has sought to seize a diplomatic high-ground (or at least equivalency) to maintain full narrative control. And it is true there is an intelligence aspect as well, but more than cyber attacks (how is downing your *own* Internet a win there?) the concern is likely that the Iranian people have been happy to share information to help target the regime, as they did during the previous 12 Day War.

It is malpractice to quote "officials" - if those are indeed "Iranian officials" - and then offer their uncontested view, when they are the ones who blacked out the Internet specifically to be able to offer an uncontested view.

When did bsd.slashdot.org drop the red header scheme?

An individual car only solves the last mile problem if you can find a space to park it right at your destination. I've definitely spent longer looking for a parking space than it takes me to walk five blocks.

The summary says "late 2022" and "29 months ago", so some editor somewhere has made a mistake. 29 months ago would be late December 2023.

I had three CoVID vaccines and since then I've had CoVID at least twice. The immune systems works on specific protein sequences, not on the names we give to pathogens. :shrug:

all medical personnel should be using PPE before coming into contact with any bodily fluids of patients.

That's easy to say, but you don't always know that you're going to come into contact with bodily fluids. Vomit, in particular, can be unexpected and hard to dodge.

Now, I don't call that a "vaccine passport" and as far as I know vaccination and medical info isn't tied to any official passport, nor is there some kind of required medical-info-passport-work-a-like

There is a medical-info-passport-work-a-like ([1], [2]). It's coming up to its centenary, and it's most commonly associated with yellow fever. However, CoVID vaccination doesn't currently fit into that framework.