ajdlinux

- they're able to investigate whether the regulators did their job properly in regulating, while being organisationally at least somewhat distant from the regulator they're looking at (obviously they tend to maintain close relationships with the appropriate regulators but at least they're not literally in the same building)

- people will be more willing to talk to investigators if they know that their evidence won't be used against them in court or used for a licence suspension

- you can grant non-regulatory investigators greater powers to compel testimony and documentary evidence, perhaps even if it's self-incriminating (I can't speak for the US but it's common here in Australia where we don't have a 5th Amendment entrenched guarantee), without running into as many ethical issues as when you give coercive information-gathering powers to regulators - you ban such compelled testimony from being used as evidence in court or in regulatory proceedings

- you don't need as high a standard of proof to make an investigatory finding as if you're taking punitive action against a specific individual

- the overall purpose of the investigation is aimed at systemic safety, rather than getting a successful prosecution

None of this prevents the regulators from running a parallel investigation with the aim of regulatory punishment - and indeed, two sets of independent eyes on complex scenarios is good too.

In places that aren't America, it's often a legal requirement (whether by statute or by customary contractual clauses) to give a minimum notice period, and employees who resign without notice can be penalised an amount of money that may be non-trivial for many workers.

I think, from my quick reading of the code, that it's triggerable by having VGA arbitration enabled (which requires having PCI enabled) and having IBM VIO support compiled in, without having a VGA device.

In any case, QEMU will give you a VGA device when run with default options, so it's not that rare for developers to run VMs with a VGA card.

This particular bug was found by one of our excellent test engineers, I'm not sure what specifically he was doing that led him to hit this bug, beyond testing stuff with KASAN enabled on a real machine using the IBM PowerVM hypervisor.

QEMU (with its pseries machine type) doesn't actually run the PowerVM hypervisor, but rather it directly implements a very similar hypervisor-guest interface (based on the Power Architecture Platform Reference and Open Firmware) such that they are treated as the same hardware platform in Linux's eyes.

QEMU is also capable of emulating a variety of other PowerPC machine types, including PowerNV/OpenPOWER bare-metal systems, various Power Macs, RS/6000s etc.

> Maybe a few hundred people buy this Thinkpad model/variant to run Linux

My employer alone would be responsible for several hundred X1 Gen 10s running Linux across various parts of our company, I suspect.

You know what I really want for collaborating on projects and such right now? Google Wave (but obviously executed better than it was back in 2009). I want the integration of synchronous and asynchronous in one application - because I do actually need both Slack-style and email-style communication for different things.

I'm involved in a community advocacy organisation that uses Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for public engagement.

Facebook is a great platform for actually getting normal people to see our content and invite them along to our meetings and such. Twitter, on the other hand, has a far more niche audience - but I know for a fact that the niche audience includes several state legislators who follow us and interact with our tweets, and we've gotten several press stories via contacts we've made with journalists over Twitter.

If you've got a message to get out there, it's a highly strategic platform.

In Australia, our New Payments Platform (which has been rolled out to almost all banks at this point) allows you to set up an email address or mobile phone number as your "PayID", which negates the major advantage you mention for P2P transfers. (People are still getting used to using PayIDs at the moment, so I still get many friends sending me their bank account numbers like they always have, but usage is definitely picking up.)

It is operated by a private company, but as a former Federal Airports Corporation airport, the land on which the airport is built is owned by the Commonwealth and leased to the private operator on a 99-year lease.

Australia has federal legislation that applies state law to federal land, in general (the Commonwealth Places (Application of Laws) Act 1970).

(Also, it's only major airports - state capital city airports, plus a handful of regional airports that were formerly owned by the Federal Airports Corporation - that are federal land. Most airports in Australia are small regional airports that are and were always owned by local government and not subject to the special federal land ownership and leasing regime of the major airports.)

A lot of people who have lived entirely in the x86 world are completely unaware that a single CPU architecture can have many, many, many different incompatible types of system architecture - x86 means a few sub-types of BIOS + UEFI-based PCs, while ARM, Power, etc have far more variance.

There's also the issue of performance-optimised assembly routines, which impacts many native libraries doing things such as crypto, image processing, etc.

The ACT Legislative Assembly's Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety has repeatedly raised the issue of access to standards, as have other state parliaments like WA. Little has been done about it, even though they're asking for something as minimal as providing access to standards via public libraries. Apparently there was a COAG working group looking at the problem but they've seemingly achieved little, and they're not even aiming very high to begin with.

https://www.parliament.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/000...

Standards Australia continues to exist as a non-profit industry association - you're thinking of SAI Global, which was SA's for-profit services wing that got sold off.

Or you could just have the government itself develop the software in tandem with the tax regulations. Obviously, even that would still be easier and cheaper with a less complex tax code, but in this thread we're talking about "open source tax software" that shouldn't even really need to exist when the government could just provide a fully functional web portal where the corner cases have been tested exhaustively by the organisation that knows those corner cases better than anyone.

From what I can tell from https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs - enabling a JIT for Emacs Lisp

It's impossible to get a handgun licence for self-defence unless you work for a security company like Armaguard, who are only allowed to use guns for defence of property rather than bodyguard-style services.

And NZ is having outbreaks from hotel quarantine in the middle of major cities too, exactly like us.

I'm not saying the Australian rollout has been good. I'm just saying it's been better than New Zealand.

The impression I get as an internet observer from the West Island is that on the whole the NZ government has done a much better job of public communications, maintaining social cohesion, and not trying to police their way out of a pandemic than Australia has. But we'll see whether that lasts. The political environment can change - see NSW - and if level 4 restrictions last more than a few weeks I think you might see the protests start up.

> Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials.

New Zealand also screwed up vaccinations by not buying AstraZeneca - as evidenced by the fact that they're several percentage points behind Australia and constrained by Pfizer supplies from overseas with no ability to rely on domestic or Australian manufacturing.

Australia ordered AZ from overseas, AZ manufactured locally, Pfizer, Novavax and now Moderna (as well as the UQ vaccine which as you mentioned failed).

NZ is well on the path to becoming like AU in the next few weeks - it's not at all obvious they'll manage to crush their current outbreak and won't end up like Victoria currently, and their vaccination and even testing capabilities seem to be behind Australia considerably.

If you've lived around government circles for long enough (in my case, merely existing in Canberra for a decade) you inevitably hear stories of senior public servants running through airport terminals, briefcase with classified documents in hand, because the Minister is going to get a plane in ten minutes and their signature is needed on an order for some critical law enforcement or defence matter that has arisen in the last couple of hours.

(I've also been told by government friends that there are plenty of very significant government locations where you would assume they have a Top Secret classified, airgapped network, but they don't, even though they have appropriately classified rooms for storing and reading Top Secret print documents.)

Just to be clear - most of the countries you give as your examples aren't MMP systems, they are other proportional representation systems, and the problems you have with it are common to proportional representation systems broadly rather than MMP.

> in Britain

In Great Britain, as opposed to Northern Ireland...

What does it mean for a SWF to be "democratically accountable"?

Given SWFs generally act like other large scale institutional investors - I suppose democratic accountability has put political pressure on some SWFs to act on ESG concerns (changing investment strategies away from fossil fuels towards renewables, voting in favour of climate activist resolutions, etc) but apart from that, is there any reason to think that the Crown Estate is doing a bad job at maximising returns to the government?

(And to be clear, though I suspect you know this - I'm not using the S in SWF to refer to the head of state specifically, but to the government, as is the traditional meaning)

If 75% of the profits go to the government (and arguably, as long as the monarchy continues to exist, the other 25% covers expenses that the government would end up funding anyway), then doesn't that make the Crown Estate actually a small Sovereign Wealth Fund more than anything else?

Lots of the media coverage around the Crown Estate seems to focus on the wealth of the Royal Family - if I were their PR team I'd be trying to push the (quasi-)SWF angle pretty hard.

The reports you read were likely based on commentary from techies who have no understanding about law, plus a handful of lawyers involved with digital rights organisations that have an incentive to play up the significance of the legislation a bit / talk about worst-case scenarios, worst possible interpretations of a dangerous law and the broadest possible interpretation of who constitutes a "designated communications provider". The government has stated that's not how they interpret the legislation, as the service provider will be the employer not the employee, and I don't think government lawyers are in the habit of arguing that the government _doesn't_ have power to do something.

I'm as suspicious about the Assistance and Access Bill as anyone, but the "telling an employee to implement a backdoor without telling their employer" is really a red herring and I don't know why the Australian tech community was so keen to go along with that.

While they're less interested in that information than the US is, for the reason you explain, they're definitely still interested - many wealthy people who only pay tax in the country where they live still have substantial assets and income streams of various sorts overseas, which they must report in their local tax return.

The intergovernmental agreements signed with the US to enable FATCA reporting often also include a reciprocity clause requiring the IRS to provide information to foreign tax authorities - sections 3 and 4 of https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-14-64.pdf are a (possibly outdated) list of countries that the IRS has manual or automatic information sharing agreements with.