It’s not because people kept printing their emails 40" wide on the plotter? TIL.

Well first off, through God Linux, all things are possible. You can have multiple hard links to a file, where a given hard link is deleted, but you can still manipulate the file through any other other links. Alternately, you can open a file, and while you have a valid open file descriptor, delete the file. The file descriptor is still valid until you close the file though, so you can still save (thus move) it to a new location.

Windows locks files when you open them, preventing these kinds of shenanigans.

In addition, good elections have a couple more properties. They should be understandable by the average voter. Paper ballots work well for this (esp. in FFTP jurisdictions). Online voting makes it really hard for even experts to completely understand the system, and impossible outside of a tiny number of experts to verify.

Second, elections are a social activity, and should feel like it. Anything that make an election feel like we’re all getting together to select our leadership, rather than an adversarial process should be encouraged. Online anything these days seems to be optimizing for max animosity. A counterexample might be the Australian democracy sausages.

Anyone with less capabilities of a medium sized nation-state will not be able to “just smash” an AWS datacenter.

Scribus has really good PDF support. It’s a full desktop publishing program (like InDesign), so it might not be the best for quick conversions. It does a really good job of PDF forms though.

Guy tried to enlist the boss’s brother in law to falsify work. “We don’t have to walk all the way up the mountainside to do the work, the client will never check it”. Then he went home, leaving said brother in law to do all the work by himself.

A week after getting fired, he called the boss about the performance bonus that was promised at the start of the contract.

My first vehicle was a 1971 Ford 3/4 ton. It was extremely reliable and tough. Having sat for most of the previous 30 years in a barn, it even looked good.

But it had all of the safety features of 1971. Power brakes the would lock up and throw you off the road if you more than thought about braking. Lap belts and a solid steel steering wheel to smash your teeth on. If you somehow hit the steering wheel hard enough to break it, you’d be impaled on the steel pipe steering column. Speaking of the steering, it didn’t have power steering, so if you hit a rut on a rough road, the steering wheel would spin out of control. You had to just let go of it until it stopped spinning lest it break your thumbs. Also, the gas tank was inside the cab behind the seat for extra car crash fun.

It was a beautiful death trap. I kinda wish I could have put it back into a barn for another 30 years instead of selling it.

Also, unless you’re one of those people who legitimately doesn’t care if food tastes good or not, learn to cook. You don’t have to be good a cooking everything, but develop a repertoire of food that is healthy and you like to eat.

The age where you could depend on a wife to be a good cook for you are long past.

It’s not a hard real time OS though. Real Time Linux would be appropriate for some subsystems in a car, but not for things that are safety critical with hard timing constraints, e.g. ABS controllers.

Honestly, they can just send the keywords. No need to send audio if they can match 1000 or so words that are most meaningful to advertisers and send counts of those.

AFAIK this is only speculated, not proven.

At least some of the app developers have realized that if they develop for Postgres they get to keep the Sql Server licensing costs for themselves. Windows server licensing costs too, if they’re clever.

Unfortunately the old janky enterprise shit will probably never get updated. You know the ones. The ones that think they’re new and hip because they support SSO (Radius only)

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Most games work well; some don’t yet, and a few probably never will (CoD, PUBG). The easiest way to check is to go here: https://protondb.com and either look up the games you actually play, or just give it your steam profile URL on the profile page and have it scan your library.

Many people who aren’t vegan still choose free range eggs, organic beef, fair trade coffee and chocolate.

The 500 mile diet is absolutely a moral choice, even if it includes meat.

Albertans preferentially eating large amounts of Alberta beef is viewed as a virtue there. Veganism is viewed as immoral, unalbertan (amongst some communities).

Furries, to be sure, but atheists?

What “other side”? Vegans? I suppose there are some who are just sort of “cultural vegans” too, where they don’t have a moral stance, but are vegan because their friends or family are.

I’m not sure if maybe you’re reading more negativity in my comment than I meant. There’s certainly nothing wrong with animal welfare as a moral stance.

Veganism at its core is a moral stance. If not for the moral issues, these people would probably be vegetarian instead. That’s not to say that all vegans are the aggressive evangelist kind, but pretty much all vegans choose their diet out of moral concerns (in addition to health and environmental reasons).

Wireshark may or may not help you here. The proposed mechanism is abusing the wake words, which are processed locally on the device. Each marketing wake word could be processed, set a flag and go back to sleep with no network activity. Periodically a bit array of flags would be sent to the server with any other regular traffic (checking for notifications, perhaps). The actual audio never gets sent. I’m not saying that Facebook actually does this, but it’s a reasonable explanation for the behaviour seen in the Vice article.

And their conclusion was completely wrong.

Because unless you’re a journalist, a lawyer, or have some kind of role with sensitive information, the access of your data is only really going to advertisers. If you’re like everyone else, living a really normal life, and talking to your friends about flying to Japan, then it’s really not that different to advertisers looking at your browsing history.

These days, a private conversation about pregnancy, abortion, voting, or your feelings about geopolitical stuff like Gaza or Ukraine could absolutely be used against you, depending on where you live.

Depending on where you live, the environment hasn’t been this clean in decades. The '70s and '80s were nasty.