The Brexit referendum in 2016 did NOT permit all British registered voters to vote. This was taken to court multiple times.

The number of people who were entitled to vote was very tightly restricted. Access to a polling station was limited. There were many factors that could result in you being excluded. Postal ballots were largely not permitted, even though they were officially allowed. If you were overseas at that precise moment, you couldn't vote. You had to specially register to vote for it, but the website (which not everyone could access, strangely enough) was only up erratically. Those in the Isle of Man, although full British citizens, were not permitted to vote, for example.

The UK mostly doesn't do voter suppression. However, they did for the Referendum. Basically, anyone who might not be racist was not permitted to vote.

Even then, 48% still insisted on staying in the EU.

One of the reasons the UK doesn't do voter suppression the way the US does is because (until very recently) the House of Lords had a lot of people in it who owed no favours at all to the political elite but did have a huge responsibility to making sure that things functioned in the long term. This has since been corrupted, so the HoL is no longer anything like as independent and politically neutral as it once was. Rather, the two main parties have stuffed it full of sycophants, which makes it useless. Which, of course, was the intended effect.

Because those in the HoL were partly hereditary (and therefore not under anyone's thumb and impossible to manipulate) and partly chosen on actual merit (they'd done stuff that was actually impressive and good for the country), the HoL were the true guardians of the Constitution and the nation. The House of Commons has always been corrupt and degenerate, so a parallel system that politicians couldn't control meant their worst excesses would always be curbed. The HoL has defended the common person FAR FAR more often than anyone in the Commons ever has.

This didn't make the HoL perfect, or even advisable to retain in its historic form, but it made it immune to the corruption that we were seeing in the rest of the system. What we needed was a replacement system that retained that immunity and improved on it.

Although there is a right join, no far right join has ever been defined and there's no signs that it would in fact be possible.

Yeeees and no. It matters in terms of loans he can get from banks. A trillionaire gets an awful lot better deal than anyone else.

So although he cannot liquidate a trillion dollars, there's a decent chance he can borrow at exceptionally low interest rates enough to do pretty much whatever he wants because he has the moniker.

It's not hard to be morally superior to a childish self-righteous socipoath.

He's not bright, he's not clever, he IS abusive, and he is exceptionally rich. However, only an idiot equates "rich" with "better".

I would say more than half of Slashdot can match or exceed his intelligence. And that's despite the fact that Slashdot has attracted pet rocks as users in recent years. Actually, truth be told, it's because of that. Back in the younger days of Slashdot, I'd say 95% of the regulars were smarter than Musk.

All Musk has is money. And I can understand you envying that. But here's the thing. Smart people don't talk their company's value down. Smart people invest their money. Musk throws it around, such as buying Twitter and destroying the userbase.

Musk is not your friend.

Or more like "cloud infrastructure running within physical and legal jurisdiction of the EU is running locally to the EU" if you prefer .. if it's software they've written, running on hardware within the EU's physical and legal reach, voila, "sovereignty".

"The only way to ensure sovereignty and control is with software running locally with NO cloud dependency."

They're not talking about personal sovereignty. Cloud infrastructure an organization owns is "running locally" to that organization.

I don't know about empty rooms, but it's very normal in Britain, if you're walking through a field, to turn left and walk clockwise around the edge of the field. But the problem there is potential for bias because of the area.

When rambling through the British countryside, the standard protocol is to turn left immediately on entry but then walk clockwise around the field. So turning left seems to be fixed, but the direction of preference is determined by when.

that particular amendment was voted down, bozo - the system works, no hand wringing required

doesn't mean hate speech doesn't exist

Anthropic are responsible parents and never let a child process wander the streets on its own.

Seriously, I'm just not seeing the supposed benefits from AI at this time, just a very large number of risks.

That is precisely why it is considered extremely bad practice to have developers test their own code beyond basic sanity-checking. Developers will inherently test with the very same assumptions they made when they coded, so will never capture the areas in which their work is most likely to be fragile.

Unfortunately, QA teams just aren't up to decent QA. They tend to miss all kinds of very obvious problems and flaws. In part because deadlines matter more than their jobs and they know it.

I'm pretty sure corporations are worse for the environment than people.

You're confident in suggesting that corporations don't cater to the demand of the market, the customers of whom seems to be waiting for the heads of those corporations to take the bus before they can be bothered to stop pissing in their own pools?

Tragedy of the commons to a tee.