xorcist

> I don't really feel this is any worse than downloading a binary from a distro archive

Please don't say that. It denigrates the work of all the packagers that actually keep our supply chains clean. At least in the major distributions such as Red Hat/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu.

The distro model is far from perfect and there are still plenty of ways to insert malware into the process, but it certainly is far better than running binaries directly from a web page. You have no idea who have access to that page and its mirrors and what their motives are. The binary isn't even signed, let alone reviewed by anyone!

An import tax works just like any other tax. You decide a law that "import of fresh fruit from Mexico is as of (date) subject to a 10% tax" together with details about exactly what fruit is considered fresh, how to calculate the tax, and where to pay.

Punishing their own nationals is very explicitly how this is sold to the voter base. "Prices are going to go up for you but unfortunately we have to do this to try to stop our neighbor from raising their import tax explicitly on goods from us".

Taxes are not a problem if everyone plays by the same rules. The problem for the economy is that some imports are subject to tax and others aren't, or when domestic goods aren't subject to the same tax. Picking winners and losers in an economy by political has never before in history turned out a winning concept.

How many developer accounts can you register, once Google starts requiring enough personal information including callback to phone numbers?

Because the banhammer is coming down, sooner or later.

Hopefully one of those volunteers is yourself.

You do not have to watch every district, every election, every time. But given that enough people do it, at least once, at least in their own district, then it is easy to see why the system as a whole is trustworthy.

Having elections is in no way enough to have a democracy. You also need a functioning justice system and free media. What you describe is not part of the election system but of the justice system.

If the police does not uphold the laws that guarantee just elections, if they allow intimidations or treat citizens differently, or if the military tries to influence election results, then you do not have a democracy.

The obvious problem with smartphone voting is that it's hard to combine with voter secrecy. An abusive spouse or someone bribing the voter could demand to see what vote was cast.

And if anyone can make up a reason to doubt the outcome of the election, it will fail it's objective: Peaceful transfer of power.

The usual way to try to solve this is the ability to override previously cast votes, in secret. But the combination of that and the ability for all interested parties to independently verify the count is not trivial. But not impossible either, much has been written on the subject since e-voting was all the rage in the 90s. One would do good to study this work before designing yet another voting system.

If you can independently verify the election result, then it does not matter if any of the counts were made using proprietary software.

If you can not independently verify election results, what good does published source code do?

Elections are a process, not a result.

After having this discussion in so many professional settings, I'm starting to think that this is just something that divides people. Maybe our brains are wired differently. What's important for me is that the call graph is simple. Second most important is that data structures are easy, or at least fits the problem. The amount of lines in a function is a distant third.

It could have been me behind one of those thousand line functions. Some tings lends itself naturally to this style, such as interpreter-like loops and imperative business logic. There's always that someone that argues that splitting up the code with function calls would somehow make it more "maintainable".

I'm reluctant to do it, because the code is identical, only non-linear which means harder to understand. Combine this with global symbols and it's a recipe for accidental complexity. This is so obvious that I for a long time thought people with the opposite opinion were just cargo-culting some OOP "best practice" mess which has doomed so many projects, but maybe they're just wired differently.

> Having Russia or Israel expressing support doesn't help,

Please. At least get the facts right.

It was not just Russia and Israel. It was also Cambodia, Azerbaijan, Gabon and Rwanda.

It's also true that "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

FWIW, NetApps were generally pretty solid, and they should have no problem keeping in sync across datacenters. You pay handsomely for the privilege though.

Failover, latency, and so on are something you need to think about independently of what transfer protocol you use. NFS may present its own challenges with all the different extensions and flags, but that's true of any mature technology.

That said, live code updates probably aren't a very good idea anyway, for exactly the reasons you mention. Those are the reasons you were right at the time, not any inherent deficiencies on the NFS protocol.

There have been plenty of suggested online voting schemes over the past several decades, yet the prevailing theme is that the ones that actually see practical use don't even try to solve the problem.

The reason why we have public elections is to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. I believe each and every scholar of political science would agree with this statement.

What's important is that there must be no reason to sow distrust into the process. No party should be able to claim their votes weren't properly counted, or that the process is somehow suspicious. The voting process could be mathematically perfect, but if people doesn't trust that votes can't be bought and counters can't be bribed then it's all for nothing.

That's why we need transparency. Not because of some higher theoretical lofty ideas, but because the basis for peaceful transfer of power between parties mutually suspicious of each other is not there.

If trust gets broken then society gets broken. Elections will continue, but in a generation or two they will cease to be able to fulfill their intended goals, and that's when we see the outcome. Not next year. That's what scares me.

More or less exactly so. There is another downside to it: When money is just a piece of plastic which you touch the cash register with and get what you want, how to you learn to appreciate money? Coins and paper money is also excellent for counting, as they naturally come in different valuations.

When counting money is just arithmetics and never cash, something is missing, and it's very clear in many young kids. Money is just points in a game, suddenly you're out, and then you can't get what you want anymore.

Of course a network can be offline. I believe that is what you describe, a network with no routes is not connected to anything else, and certainly not to the Internet?

It is common to keep admin and backup functions on separate network interfaces, on a disconnected network. You have to physically connect to the network in a secure location to use it.

The answer is more often than not alternative c) all of the above.

Development may be a random walk, but there are plenty of people with interest in a certain outcome, and when they get the opportunity they will take it and try escalate the process. That's true in most things.

I also tend to believe that it is not a coincidence that so many societies right now flirt with authoritarianism, for example. We influence each other, even more so now that information is global and electronic.

So bascially you log in to the login server, which passes a token to the vote counting server that the vote is valid but with no identifying information? And there is some way to verify that these two entities do not cooperate?

How do you override a previously cast vote in that system?

(Overriding a vote is a popular solution to vote buying/intimidating which is otherwise a problem with mail-in votes and e-votes.)

The Tux penguin was suggested as the unofficial logo for the 2.0 release of Linux, which had SMP support and was a big deal. It half-jokingly received Linus' blessing and everyone has used it since.

It's easy to see why, it is an instant classic, very cute, and works in different situations and at different scales. Larry Ewing who drew the picture, a sysadmin and not a professional illustrator, still has a web page up describing it: https://isc.tamu.edu/~lewing/linux/

Before that there were many logos but the platypus one was probably the most used. Walnut Creek, who put out CDROMs with shareware and freeware, used to publish the popular Linux distributions too and they needed something for their covers and used it.

Slackware kept using it for a long time. I believe the idea was that Linux, too, looks like it was put together by disparate parts. Web pages back in 1996 was mostly textual and pictures were used sparingly so the use case was mostly books and CDROM covers. There is a certain cuteness to it and it did look good on T-shirts.

That makes even less sense, unless we are talking about XMODEM every protocol uses windowing to avoid getting stuck waiting for ACKs.

Of course you need to wait for ACKs at some point though, otherwise they would be useless. That's how we detect, and potentially recover from, broken links. They are a feature. And HTTP3 has that feature.

Is it better implemented than the various TCP algorithms we use underneath regular SSH? Perhaps. That remains to be seen. The use case of SSH (long lived connections with shorter lived channels) is vastly different from the short lived bursts of many connections that QUIC was intented for. My best guess is that it could go both ways, depending on the actual implementation. The devil is in the details, and there are many details here.

Should you find yourself limited by the default buffering of SSH (10+Gbit intercontinental links), that's called "long fat links" in network lingo, and is not what TCP was built for. Look at pages like this Linux Tuning for High Latency networks: https://fasterdata.es.net/host-tuning/linux/

There is also the HPN-SSH project which increases the buffers of SSH even more than what is standard. It is seldom needed anymore since both Linux and OpenSSH has improved, but can still be useful.

Of course it has ACKs. There are protocols without ACKs but they are exotic and HTTP3 is not one of them.

I thought this would be about the other Linux logo, that preceeded the penguin:

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/logos/platypus/llogo.gif

A nuked Earth is still more habitable than Mars, even on their best day.

Wouldn't it be far easier and much more useful to colonize the ocean floor than other planets? It is, after all, 70% of the surface area that just sits there.

There is no us and them!

But them, they do not think the same.

What's not funny is the amount of podcast episodes that are two guys summarizing the wikipedia article, trying to be funny.

When civilization ends, we will look back at podcast episodes more numerous than the stars in the sky, and wonder if it that was really the most productive use of our entropy.

That hit much too close to reality. It's exactly like that. Even the names were spot on!

Well, there's something to be said about the inability to capitalize long term.

Britain has managed to be at the forefront of all those revolutionary technologies, but when the real break out happens somehow the Americans swoop in and buy the winners. That's shaky ground for future ingenuity.

ARM seems to have been very important to Cambridge at large, but it's not Silicon Valley. I can sort of understand why politicians would look back at things and ponder what could have been done differently.

Is sending a plausible looking letter really all that's required? Does nobody ever call back to the Insurance Association of Norway (whatever they may be called) and check references? I mean, we check job seeker's references regularly.

s/women/men/g and do you still think your argument holds?

If Javascript people were bad programmers, we wouldn't see two new frontend frameworks per year. Many of them are ambitious projects that must have had thousands of hours put in by people who know the language well.

The observation is real however. But every culture develops its own quirks and ideas, and for some reason this has just become a fundamental part of Javascript's. It's hard to know why after the fact, but perhaps it could spark the interest of sociologists who can enlighten us.

To expand a bit on that, the i386 support that was recently deprecated to "partially supported" in Debian refers to project status. Unsupported architecture can not be considered blockers, for example. The packages are still being built, are published on the mirrors, and will be for the forseeable future as long as enough people care to keep it alive.

That's the specific meaning of support that it was my intention to point out. Free software projects usually do not "support" software in the commercial sense, but consider platforms supported when there are enough persons to keep the build alive and up to date with the changing build requirements etc. It was my expectation that Firefox was more like free software project than a commercial product, but perhaps that is not the case?

Commercial products have to care about not spreading their resources thin, but for open source cause and effect are the other way around: The resources available is usually the incoming paramter that decides what is possible to support. Hence my surprise that not enough people are willing to support a platform that has thousands of users and isn't particularly exotic, especially compared to what mainstream distributions like Debian already build.

That's just it. If any of the browser vendors put 1% of the work they spent on renewing their visual identity, remodeling their home page, or inventing yet another menu system into slightly easier to use client certificates (and smart cards) this would have been a solved problem two decades ago. All the pieces are in place, every browser has supported this since the birth of SSL, it's just the user interface bits that are missing.

It's nothing short of amazing that nobody worked on this. It's not as if there isn't a need. Everyone with high security requirements (defense, banks etc.) already do this, but this clumsy plugins and (semi-)proprietary software. Instead we get the nth iteration of settings redesigns.