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Cryptography could still prevent the usage of copies of valid passports. I.e. where you have all valid names and numbers on the front, but cannot copy the passport's secret key and digital signature.

I'd add a few more:

- "Lost in space": Give your new hire a tour of the relevant facilities. Toilets, kitchen, canteen, bicycle garage, important offices (boss, secretary/team assistance, IT helpdesk, ...), etc. Same for online resources and intranet, have a proper entry page that lists everything relevant and has a proper search function (which seems to be exceedingly hard...).

- "Your chair is still on order": Have things ready on day 1. Nothing is worse than waiting on necessary accounts, hardware or people for the onboarding. If you cannot have things ready, at least have the decency to not have your new hire sit around twiddling thumbs, find something interesting and productive to do for them, e.g. learning new things.

- "Talk to the wee lass with the fangs, horns and the striped hair": Introduce people, introduce their roles and places in hierarchy. Even if things like "chain of command" are usually fuzzy at your place, at least for the first few weeks, make it easy for the new hire to fit into a simplified "command structure". Don't send a new hire to see somebody, always accompany them and make introductions.

- "Nobody likes the noob": Always make a point to include a new hire in the usual social activities. For example, go to lunch as a group (even if you usually don't) to get everyone together with the new one in a less formal setting.

No. Human sacrifice, in the definition I have given, has a clearly defined purpose (which I didn't state, because I thought this was implicit): Winning favour with the god(s). That only works in any religion I know of if you declare the purpose of making a sacrifice before the gods in some way.

The Romans did this through the ritual of immolation, where the animal was marked as a sacrifice by spreading mola (wheat spelt) and salsa (salt) on it. No immolation, no sacrifice. If they killed someone without immolation, to them it didn't have the purpose of pleasing the gods and thus wasn't human sacrifice. Edit: "immolation" in this context might be somewhat different in the english meaning. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mola_salsa for what I mean.

A lot of religions (don't know about the Roman in that aspect) also frown upon the intent of a sacrifice being impure: If you do the sacrifice with more than just the goal of pleasing God, e.g. to additionally get rid of that obnoxious goat/cock/person/..., then God won't be pleased.

One needs to be very careful about which things to label human sacrifice. It is possible to be very "inclusive" there. One popular example is the expression "sacrificed on the altar of progress", and the works of philosophers such as Adorno and Horckheimer on the topic, who argued that human sacrifice just takes a different form in modern civilisation, but is still present e.g. as victims of car traffic, suicides from depression or industrial accidents. Imho, this only serves to hinder any kind of productive discussion because things tend to be not comparable in any way if terms are _that_ mushy.

I'd define anything as human sacrifice that the culture performing the act would label thus. E.g. we, as a modern civilization, don't call an abortion, war or execution "human sacrifice", so it isn't. The Romans didn't consider executing prisoners as such, because the prisoners were just subhuman and it was just an execution, so it isn't. The Carthagians seemed to think they were doing a human sacrifice, so yes, they were.

Disgust against child sacrifice and most human sacrifice was a Roman sensibility, long before there was any church or christianity.

If they all were properly isolated there would be less of a problem, but proper isolation is hard. If they all were FLOSS, there would also be the hope of solving this problem, as long as you can prove that you are really running the right FLOSS blobs.

But I know of no Linux smartphone that would really satisfy either of those conditions properly.

VR "for the masses" has always been hobbled by the extreme prices, extreme hardware demands and incompatibility. Even very early tech like VRML died because of that.

I suspect Apple VR will lead to a short and shallow VR boom, followed by it going the way of Apple TV, 3D TV and (not quite comparable, so with reservations) AR glasses.

Yes, of course you are right. My comment was meant more along the lines of "even if the software were ultimately trustworthy because of open source, thousand eyes, careful development and fairy dust, those hardware problems would still be a way in".

Your IOMMU needs to be programmed, just like your MMU. Programming is provided by the OS and driver. Early IOMMU configuration is provided by the firmware. Check mate.

For certain things in signal you need to trust the server hardware and suspicious technologies like SGX. SGX is a prime target for a NSA backdoor. That some upper-layer software there is open source (with lots of caveats, e.g. you cannot verify which server version is really running and signal has a history of lagging behind on publishing their "open source" version of the server code) is a distraction at best.

Doesn't matter at all. If your adversary is the CIA, you cannot trust your mobile phone OS, firmware and drivers not to read and report your memory contents.

Which one?

No? What would that have to do with anything?

To be fair, attaching a bell to a cow is animal cruelty and quite unnecessary nowadays. For the outrageous price of one cow bell you can also get RFID trackers for the whole herd. Or at least a handful of GPS trackers. And that also easily fixes the annoyance of cow bells.

Also, cows themselves are not annoying. What is annoying is their owners herding them over public roads and lands, having them shit everywhere without cleaning up. And that is pervasive in rural Bavaria, far more than in the reset of Germany.

Seems somewhat paradoxical, reading on the website of a closed source software vendor about open source hardware.

Open source lives by participation, which doesn't happen if you have to pay for an Altium license as an entry fee. And even if free, proprietary vendors can always hold your design hostage.

Imho, this needs to be done in KiCAD.

The OpenPGP stuff in Germany is not officially required to be accepted as a paper signature replacement anywhere. They are just doing this as an advertisement for the eID/ePA electronic RFID passport functionality that nobody wants.

There are no official uses.

Government agencies are required to accept de-mail, which is a proprietary email-like service. However, rollout has been nonexistent even among government agencies such that you cannot practically use it anywhere, they are a decade behind their rollout plan. The system itself is design-by-committee fugly, insecure and plain weird. You have to get an account with a commercial provider, all of which have closed down by now. PGP/GPG cannot be used with de-mail (except if you copy&paste the ascii-armored ciphertext into the software), and de-mail encryption is intentionally breakable anyways (officially "to scan for viruses").

The eID/ePA "elektronischer Personalausweis" electronic RFID passport which you need to use is another such weird proprietary waste of taxpayer money, accepted nowhere because it doesn't follow any standards and using the RFID function (e.g. as a bank for opening an account) costs tens of thousands per year just for the certificate you need. So nobody uses it and nobody enables the RFID functionality. Therefore the govt got the brilliant idea (among other, far less pleasant ideas such as requiring it for certain payouts) to offer free signatures on GPG/PGP keys using the ePA.

> I develop with Haskell professionally. That foldl example of yours is pretty rare and usually dealt with the QuickCheck [1], mother of all other quickchecks. Usually, the trace will be outside of the foldl application, but you can have it there in the foldl argument, of course.

So actually not everywhere. And QuickCheck does something else entirely.

Not everything is tracing and debugging, sometimes you really need to output intermediate results for "normal", "production" purposes. One could still abuse Debug::Trace, but that would really be ugly.

I also object to that "everywhere". It is far easier to just dump an extra 'print' line somewhere inside a for-loop than into a `foldl (*) 1 $ map (+ 3) [17, 11, 19, 23]`. And that is an easy one...

"Oh, you _also_ need to print something? Lets stack a few monad transformers..."

"But remember that you need the TemplateExplicative and NullUnderstanding compiler extensions!"

Forget Berlin. The Ruhr area, biggest continuous settlement in Germany, with roughly 20 million inhabitants (of which maybe 5 million would be affected), is below its local water table because "the dwarves delved too greedily and too deep". So now they are spending 100Mio per year on pumping away the ground water, probably forever:

https://www.worldtimes-online.com/imfocus/105-pumpen-im-ruhr...

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/03/the-pumps-that-keep-ge...

Ah. Thanks for the explanation. With that I agree completely.

But then you'd miss on crystal structure to distinguish your diamonds from your coal.

Yes, but what would be the alternative?

Of course you can use artificial keys like a random UUID for each of your db objects. Which will work quite well if you only interact with your own system.

But as soon as one of your db objects needs to be linked to some other system, you will need some common ground for a correlation, and something like a personnummer will help immensely and solve 99.9% of your problems. The 0.1% of problematic cases is far less than the headaches that the absence of some common ID scheme will cause you.

Imagine e.g. having to correlate on the usual "Name, First Name, Birth Name, Place of Birth, Date of Birth" dance: My place of birth used to be called Lower Unxton at the time of my birth, now it has been reformed with Upper Unxton and Exampleville into Greater Unxton. Which one do you want? Did I always give the same answer to that question? My parents also divorced and my birth name legally changed. Do you want the old or the new birth name? Btw., my legal date of birth is actually in a non-gregorian calendar. How do I input that into your form field, it doesn't seem to like Showa 50 as a year, not even to speak about the proper characters?

I'd claim any imperfect personnummer is still far superior to all the problems one would have without it.

> On the energy markets in Europe, at least the one Germany is connected to, the prices per kWh are calculated basedbon generation costs. Meaning investments and fox costs are not considered.

Nope. Definitely not.

Prices are based on a) fixed-price contracts that are negotiated with energy-producers and b) an spot-price auctioning model that is based on supply/demand. As an energy reseller, what you cannot get with your long-term contracts you have to make up with spot priced. With some additional provisions: Renewables get fixed prices (determined by bid) by lay by their regional reseller. And the highest spot price is always paid out to all lower-priced energy producers.

But in all that, no energy producer will leave out the building and financing cost from their price calculation. Otherwise e.g. renewables would be free, because their generation cost is practically zero, no people or fuel to pay for, just building and financing.

Electricity can be stored, mostly in pumped hydro storage, but also in e.g. battery storage, pressurized air or heated rock. But storage is scarce, expensive and doesn't look like it is going to be built anytime soon (for the usual reasons, NIMBY, environmentalism, YAGNI (correct or imagined), "energy abstinence is more virtuous", "we can manage by regulating demand", etc.)

But with sufficient baseload nuclear, one could free up gas capacity because of the lower demand for gas peaker plants. Similarly, if electricity were as cheap as gas per kWh, many industrial applications could actually switch to electrical heating.

Where Europe is protectionist about tech, the US did the same about steel, aluminium, aircraft and certain foods. I guess the tech sector is just more present in the minds of HN readers.

Nuclear is dirt cheap when you have your power plants already built. Most of the cost of nuclear is building cost and related capital cost for the loans you take to build one and teardown/disposal. All German reactors had already paid off, teardown and disposal are deposited up front. So just running cost for them, mostly people and fuel, which is in the 5ct/kWh range (for sources e.g. look at the last IPCC report, but good numbers are hard to come by for the usual trade secret reasons).

Wind is also in the 5ct/kWh range, solar at 10ct/kWh. However, to get both to a load factor of over 90% (which is typical for nuclear power plants) you would need a sufficient amount of storage and overbuild your capacity, which will cost an additional >10ct/kWh.

Cheaper than immediately before the war. Far more expensive than the long-term average of the 2000s and 2010s.

Edit: also, immediately before the war, Russia already seems to have started restricting supply, driving up prices.