Posts by doublelayer 9408 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
Dynasties don't necessarily have to be to children. A dictatorship can work when the dictator hand-selects their replacement. Hitler did that. Franco did it too, but his replacement didn't do what Franco expected. Mussolini and Pinochet didn't get a chance to decide who would come after them because their dictatorships ended before they did, or nearly simultaneously for Mussolini. We might not label that a dynasty, but it can have similar effects.
I thought the same thing when I read that sentence, and to some extent I still think so. However, thinking more about the message, it's an announcement that he plans to sabotage someone else's work, not because it has a technical flaw, but because he doesn't like it. If I was a maintainer and someone submitted a patch for a piece of hardware, and I tried to prevent it being merged because I don't use that hardware and I don't want to worry if my future changes might break it, it would not be productive. Linux works as a project because developers agree to work in such a way that they don't break other parts, considering compatibility with parts they haven't written. The Rust developers aren't telling the maintainers that they must also write their contributions in Rust, but they are asking for the same compatibility that developers of other components are expected to provide.
Code of conduct seems like the wrong way to categorize this, but that doesn't mean that it is a completely justifiable approach to development.
This comment is another example of how you're not understanding what the problem is or how it works, since buying an abandoned domain was an alternative to, not a component of, this problem. If you leave your domain but keep your AWS account, then I cannot get access to any of your AWS resources by getting your domain.
This is no different to things people can and do on their own infrastructure. S3 bucket names are DNS names and they can be reregistered when abandoned. This makes a case for Amazon deciding that it should only be possible to register a name once and once it is deleted, it's burned forever, but we don't attack the original domain name system for allowing that. As usual, it's the responsibility for the people using those names to keep track of them.
In fact, cloud services makes it easier to do that than traditional ones. If I have a domain name that I've registered and I don't want someone to be able to squat on it, I have to keep paying for it every year. This is one reason why I have a bias to not having very many second-level domains*. If I have a S3 bucket that I don't want people to squat on, I can keep it around for free. I am charged for files stored in it and for bandwidth it uses, but if I delete all the files but keep the bucket around, the name stays registered and I retain control. It is better, however, for me to check such things rather than trust that whatever file comes back from an HTTP request is good enough.
* I generally suggest that a company with the domain company.com refers to other services they run using subdomains (product.company.com) rather than creating another second-level domain (companyproduct.com). It has three benefits. Users can more quickly identify that the domain is related to the company since only they can create a subdomain (unless they've been hacked, which is a possibility), it is easier for the company to keep track of domains they control and make sure they are either in operation or shut down, and for smaller projects, it can cut down on money spent on registrars.
Rural US internet prices are extreme, so satellite systems can turn theirs up as far as possible. Urban US generally has reasonable cabled service at much lower prices, so people aren't interested in the service anyway. European Starlink has more competition, and the capital cost to provide a cable to most uncabled locations is lower because the distances are shorter, so they have to have lower prices in order to get any customers.
The same pattern is visible when comparing other countries' prices. Canada and Australia get high prices as well, and the UK is not much better with a residential monthly price of £75, but France, Italy, and Spain get 40 euros, presumably because those countries have more competitive and complete terrestrial networks.
That's the user's problem. Linux is not supposed or designed to protect everyone from anything negative but to allow them the choice. If you choose to run an app that sells your data, then that's your choice, the same way that Linux doesn't block you from visiting Facebook if you enter that URL. However, there are many apps on Android that don't have versions for mobile Linux yet, so having compatibility with it introduces features that some people want. If you don't, you don't have to install them, but many buyers will be happier having that option than they would be without it.
No, just alcoholic ones. Ontario has a near monopoly on alcohol sales, especially to restaurants, so it can make that happen. Individuals can still purchase US-produced alcohol from independent stores, but restaurants generally aren't allowed to do that and then distribute it. It does not apply to soft drinks or any other US product.
Although some electric toothbrushes might be complex enough that turning them off and on again is both possible and helpful, it's likely that most of them are still relatively dumb and aren't going to break like that. That might mean that power cycling them isn't really possible because you'd have to physically disconnect and reconnect the battery which is sealed in, and that the problem you're experiencing wouldn't be fixed by doing so anyway. In that case, it wasn't that the reboot failed, but that the thing was just broken. It's frequent to try a power cycle when anything goes wrong, but sometimes, the problem isn't going to be solved by doing that.
Perhaps it was unclear from the two comments I wrote saying so, but I wasn't describing the rigid scheduling as positive. However, if you're going to argue against it, you have to understand why it happens. It happens for the reason that people disagreed with my comment: expecting to be able to call someone and talk right now interrupts those people during their work. Many people I know pushed back against that, and I think they pushed back too far to the extent that, if a discussion is going to take long enough that it doesn't happen over chat, they want it scheduled with a calendar invitation. This is especially true when it's more than two people meeting. However, your approach can also annoy people who are concentrating on something and are expected to stop working on their thing to help you at a time of your choosing, which isn't likely to help either.
I also agree with you about video. I don't turn it on and have never found that to be a problem. However, there are some people who want to have video on and will ask you to if you don't, and even if it's just a voice call, there are reasons why people might seek out a separate space in an office to have the call. Maybe they find it distracting if there's a lot of background noise during their call. Maybe they plan on discussing things they don't want anyone to easily overhear (so it looks like the ransomware was worse than we thought / the programmer [who sits next to me] had a bug in their code which broke us for two weeks and refused to fix it / can you confirm that they are going to cancel that project). An office without walls can still be unhelpful for calls even if the cameras stay off.
This is a reason why I prefer offices with walls. It introduces a barrier to someone interrupting you for ten seconds, but if a quick meeting is useful, then it's not hard to have one. Another thing a lot of modern offices have not bothered with, eliminating or at least significantly reducing their utility. Of course, depending on what you're doing, the frequency of when that is useful varies. Even limited to my experience as a programmer, some tasks involve a lot more coordination among a team of programmers and others can be done without much collaboration at all. Jobs other than programmer probably have a lot more differences that I'm mostly unaware of.
This is where someone trying to optimize productivity would compare the options and determine what worked the best, possibly with some experiments. If close collaboration was useful, then they could put those people together or just encourage people to set up calls quickly and flexibly rather than sticking to the stricter schedules I'm used to. If people didn't need that, then they could use different structures. Instead, they seem to select something and just mandate it based on no reasons at all, because if they had any reasoning, they could probably get somewhere by being explicit about what their reason was.
This isn't about email versus chat like Slack or Teams. Either of those can be used for a long thread with lots of participants who misinterpret things or have communication difficulties. In most cases, I prefer email because it makes it a little easier to organize things if you have good subject lines and you can manually organize threads. I certainly do when there are twenty of them that may all get updated. Nothing prevents a Slack thread from going similarly off the rails. It isn't necessarily any faster than email because people can wait to write their message until they have information they need or just some spare time.
The tool is not the factor here. The factor is knowing when a synchronous meeting would be more efficient and doing it, ideally just as long as necessary to resolve this issue and then stopping. In an earlier comment, I've stated my anecdotal experience that there can be an advantage to an environment where meeting synchronously is easy so people do it more often, but that most return to office schemes do not create that environment. From what I understand of Dell's plan, they are unlikely to get that advantage but are likely to harm and annoy their employees.
Yes, a video call can replace an in-person discussion most of the time. However, in my experience, it isn't as easy to have an impromptu video call. Many people, sometimes including me, tend to schedule those on the calendar meaning hours of delay and avoid having calls unless it is obvious that we need one. Therefore, in my experience, there is an advantage to quick communication when people are nearby one another and meet anyway. Depending on the company though, going to the office might not do any of those things. If the team is not in the same place, then being in the office just means that scheduling a video also involves finding a space to be in while you do it or dealing with office noise. Some teams might not need to do this as often either, making the office an expensive way to get that marginal improvement, both in straightforward financial costs of having the building and in other costs like people being more tired after commuting.
Wishful thinking will not help you. Canada will not do most of those things.
For example, nationalizing or eliminating US intellectual property. Any country can do that, but no country tends to do it successfully. If they did, the US could do the same to any Canadian IP. Companies that intend to operate in both countries, or in any other country, would be cautious about using any of that because of the inevitable legal collisions. It is really not as easy as you think to do that.
But then you step up to deliberately releasing nuclear waste. Canada is not going to do that because Canada is not evil. If they did, that would likely start a full-scale war. It might be better if they just started with war. It violates several treaties, and that would cost Canada most of its allies.
Canada has a lot of economic and diplomatic approaches available to it and we will see them used. While they will not be as instantaneously successful as your ideas, they will also not start a war where both sides will suffer significantly more than any trade war would do.
It does open several actions, but in general, they can all fall under the category of trade war. Tariffs are just one category of that, and you can use regulations of various types as proxy tariffs as many countries do. They can use other diplomatic levers, and Mexico probably has more of them than Canada does because they run a lot of things intended to reduce immigration to the US and that is also something the current administration cares a lot about. Even if their first move is not tariffs*, you can pretty much guarantee that the response from the US will be more tariffs. Not only are these considered by Trump to be good in their own right, they are considered punishments and the new diplomacy from the US seems to be based on doling out lots of punishments. Having no trade war would be better for all three of them, but the current US administration really likes tariffs, so a trade war is what you're going to get.
* The first move, however, will be tariffs after all. Canada and Mexico have both said this. They may be hoping that these will work as well as they did the last time. However, last time, they worked because those tariffs negatively affected politicians who supported Trump and were able to convince him to back down on some of his actions. Time will tell if that pipeline still exists and works as before.
"The only problem with this solution is that it is built on an incredible scaffold of technology which is only one prop removal from coming tumbling down."
How would those things come tumbling down? The software that runs the virtual machine can be open source. The software you're running in the virtual machine isn't, but thousands of copies are available, specifically from people intending to archive them. The open source document conversion tools have many copies on there, and they may even be in the GitHub Arctic archive. Let's say that I am a supervillain and I want to deliberately prevent you from opening a 1990 Microsoft Word file that you didn't bother to save as something else. How would I be able to do that, when all those tools are available for you?
But let's consider age. Maybe we can run Windows 3.1 in a virtual machine now, but maybe in 2050, we won't be able to. I'm not sure why because our ability to emulate old systems has increased rather than decreased with time. Enthusiasts have written lots of emulators and archived plenty of software. In the case of Windows, it's emulating a standard X86 processor and the software to do so has already been written. The processor architecture still exists, meaning that anyone wanting to emulate it, whether to run Windows 3.1 or something else, will maintain it. This isn't true of every piece of software. Something niche which only a few people ever used, has a proprietary format that nobody reverse-engineered, and an activation mechanism which has not been circumvented, could indeed produce a file that is prohibitively difficult to preserve in a usable form. This is why I recommend that people consider the formats used by software if they need the files they create to be available long-term and export them to something standard. Microsoft Word is a bad example of this.
And, if preserving the files is important enough, you would deal with this by copying it onto new media from time to time. Archives do this all the time, including with paper, where they may make copies of documents. Those copies can be used by the public while the fragile originals are kept secure, and those copies can be copied so you always have an available copy and never have to go to the original. Of course, keeping around an original which you are never willing to touch is expensive, and sometimes an archive can manage just fine without one in the first place, simply copying copies to preserve and access. It's not that a USB disk is sufficient for storing a file forever, but that even if you have to buy a new one and copy it over with redundant copies every decade, it's not very expensive. It's even less expensive if you include it with the rest of your archives which you store on disks or tapes.
If you haven't bothered to save your 1990 ultra-historical document any other times, then maybe it's not so ultra-historical. True, you can find eight original copies of the Magna Carta out there, but I can also find millions of newer copies which are identical because it was important enough to preserve. That also means that, if some disaster had destroyed those eight originals at some point, we'd still know what the Magna Carta said. You probably can't find any of the original copies of the Zimmermann Telegram either because the German copy was probably destroyed and the British-intercepted version was a temporary document sent for decoding, but it was historical, so we made a copy and stored that.
My three "un-natural acts", which would get you the content of the file for copying and preservation, are not hard to do now and will continue to be achievable with little technical knowledge. I'm not sure what makes them so unnatural since they basically boil down to reading the file and seeing what it says, either using the original software or something that reads its files. They won't make it simple to recover any document 800 years hence for the same reason that I can't get you many other documents from the 1200s today: if the file is gone, it won't help, if the file can't be located because it wasn't labeled, it won't help, and if you can't be bothered to preserve something, it won't help. If you are aware of any important documents that are in 1990 Word format, and you think they are worth preserving, then you can perform these acts and preserve them. I'm willing to volunteer to do that for anything sufficiently important, just let me know. The data that nobody chooses to do that with is probably going to get lost, just as the paper that was burned because making a copy and moving it wasn't considered important.
As for Micrographx Designer, here you go. If you didn't bother to save your data when you stopped using the program, even if you're regretting it now, it probably means that it wasn't as important as you think. If it was, you would have done more to keep it. Of course, we've all had the experience of losing something we wish we hadn't, and we respond to that by putting more effort into retaining access to it. A file that is very old is not hard to preserve, just as a piece of paper from a long time ago isn't hard to preserve. That some old paper is around does not demonstrate that it is any better at it, and I am confident that, if there are humans in 2800, they'll have lots of files created during our lifetimes available for perusal. It just won't be very many with my name on them, because most of the files I make are not historically relevant.
I disagree. You can go to museums and see a small collection of machines. Those will either be the most important ones, thus the ones that were mass-produced and were easily found when they were building the collection, or a few notable ones they went to some expense to obtain. It won't show you lots of machines that were custom-built for one factory and eventually scrapped. Those machines were destroyed before anyone put them in a museum, and the engineer's diagrams were probably stored in paper archives until someone burned them to make more space.
A hundred years from now, your proprietary software may well have been permanently deleted, but a lot of software from the age will still be around. This is especially true for all the open source software that was foundational. If you want the Apache HTTP server, a version in 1996 that was neither the first nor anything people use today, you can still have it. The same is true for all sorts of other tools. Like the museum, things that weren't used in lots of places and weren't preserved by their creators will have disappeared. Unlike the museum, you could go through the archives and get volumes of information, not just the code, but discussions, bug reports, the lot, for a lot of very important things.
And the worst things about paper when compared to digital storage are that it is really easy to destroy, it is extremely difficult to search, and it is much more costly to copy. If you want something archived, the most important thing is having copies and storing them in preservable ways. In the time it takes me to photocopy one page, I can make a copy of a whole book in digital form and send it to servers on multiple continents.
"A Microsoft Word document from 1990 cannot be rendered accurately today!"
You can:
1. Run a virtual machine of Windows 3.1 with a version of Office from the time, both of which are easily obtained and run for free on commodity hardware today.
2. Run a virtual machine of Windows 98 with a later version of Office which still has backward compatibility with that version and the ability to save that version as something later which can be opened by modern software.
3. Extract the information from the document using open source software today, though you may have to do slightly more to restore something if you used an unusual function.
Let me guess, you meant that modern software doesn't open that format natively, and that was your complaint? I disagree that there is any problem with that, but it is also not what you said.
"What would happen to Intel sales if people didn't feel they had to run Windows on Intel processors?"
A lot, but how would we get from where we are to there? AMD64, including both Intel and AMD parts, is in use because it is fast and cheap. Most other ISAs don't achieve similar levels, with ARM as the primary other example. Maybe RISC-V or Loongson or something else will be similarly fast and cheap some years from now, but it isn't today, so people today buy one of those two. Even ARM is still missing some sectors of the market; they've got chips covering the low end up to laptops and they've got massive tons-of-cores chips for servers, but they don't have something for desktops or laptops requiring more performance than average. Well they kind of do, but only Apple has them and you don't get to run much on them. So AMD64 it is and will be until that sector gets filled in. That goes for Linux and BSD too.
"What would happen if someone came to Microsoft and said "We will design a processor optimised to execute Windows*, and we'll give you a chunk of the profits to do so" ?"
Microsoft would be happy. They'd say "yes please" and sign that agreement. Then they'd leave the meeting and not think about those people for several years while the processor designers spend their own money trying to make a new ISA from scratch. If, by some miracle, those people succeeded, Microsoft would recompile Windows for the thing and, since by definition it would run well if they designed the processor specifically for it, they'd have another product line to sell. They would probably need to write X64 emulation for that new ISA again, which they would do because they already saw what not having it does to an operating system (everybody hates Windows RT) and what having it does for one (Windows on ARM still going strong and gaining more acceptance).
Admittedly, some of their newer models have much higher repairability scores. Not all of their models have the same problems. Unfortunately, they seem to have decided that they can command much higher prices than comparable laptops. Maybe they do have buyers at those prices, but that won't be me. I don't see a Surface as having an advantage to justify its increased price. At least Apple has Mac OS, though they've also driven me away with repairability decreases and increasingly unjustifiable pricing at least for laptops.
That wouldn't really help, since pretty much everybody doing malicious things with it have the ability to VPN out. Geofencing would just prevent the average user from using it. No great loss for either side, but it won't do anything to malicious uses. In my opinion, they shouldn't use their other profiling methods to block them either. I don't think the things they do with an LLM are very dangerous. Trying to block them might be more help than harm to them because it would teach them how to hide at the cost of a slight delay in getting useful phishing messages, which they can obtain from a lot of other sources anyway.
They aren't working well for the shareholders, but they do have a requirement to act for them. Shareholders have the right to force Musk out of Tesla if they choose to, whereas taxpayers don't, no matter how much we might want to. Also, enough of the shareholders have supported Musk's actions that I have to conclude that they are fine with it. I don't understand why, but there seem to be people willing to live with the status quo and invest their money in that. If they want to give Musk far more in value than the company actually has, then I suppose it is working for them.
I absolutely agree. If he had a non-Nazi explanation, he had the opportunity to say it. He didn't try, only giving a cursory denial. That speaks volumes, but what exactly it says remains somewhat subjective which isn't good enough for reporters. My original reference to how frequently he fails to communicate wasn't meant to imply that I think he had some other meaning in mind, but to point out that a reporter would have to consider it before describing the incident. Unless he chooses to explain it, we are left with probabilities, and one that seems very likely to me is that he evidently doesn't much mind that Nazis are celebrating the gesture, whether he intended that or not. I would be pretty worried if Nazis were celebrating something I'd done, and that difference in attitude has a large effect on my opinion about him.
It is clear that he made the gesture, but that isn't enough for newspapers to call it a "Nazi salute". There are two reasons for that. The phrase states, not just an action, but an intention. A paper could easily justify calling it a "Nazi-style salute", meaning only that it resembles one, but if they call it a "Nazi salute", then they are stating that he agrees with Nazis. A lot of newspapers have standards which basically forbid making such statements. They can say it looked like one. They can say that Nazis interpreted it as one. They can say that a lot of people thought it was one. They can say that Musk's actions suggest it was one. But while he is saying that it wasn't one, they're likely to stick an "alleged" in there to indicate that the intent was not proven, because there remains some chance that he had something else in mind, even if that chance is unlikely.
This is partially due to journalistic standards, but it is also because, if they suggest an intent, they can be sued for defamation. Not necessarily successfully, but it happens and the journalists don't always win. Musk is frequently litigious, and even though many of his cases fall somewhere in the range from dubious to obviously going to lose, it is a prospect that some papers don't take lightly. That is not the only reason why they may choose not to say it, but it is certainly one of them.
No, I am not trying to tell you that Musk has not gotten government money. Most of his businesses rely on firehoses of government money that never turn off, and when he doesn't get it, he gets angry. I'm trying to tell you that, just because he has gotten government money, it doesn't mean individual citizens can do anything about it, especially if we're also referring to things he is doing as part of a business that aren't directly related to government money. His actions as a government employee are different from his actions running Tesla. Not that individual citizens have much chance of doing something about either of them, but the reasons why they won't have much effect are different for the two things. This article is about Tesla.
I encourage you to provide instructions on how we bankrupt someone we don't like. I have never bought a Tesla or Spacex product before. I am unlikely ever to do so. They don't seem too worried about this. If I dislike Musk, tell me, what other action can I take? I think you are overestimating what anyone, or even any largish group, can do about this, which is a problem because you're clearly angry at people for not doing something they can't.
Who are you referring to? Politicians theoretically work for the public, and they get people shouting instructions at them all the time. They ignore those people. If you have a way of changing that, I'd like the details on that.
If you're talking about Tesla, though, then they don't work for the public. They work for their shareholders, the people who saw Musk make the same statements he always made and cheerfully bought more stock. The people who approved paying Musk billions. Enough of them evidently don't mind whatever Musk is doing. The rest of the public can do little to change this. They could refuse to buy anything from Tesla, but that only goes so far.
As long as he says that it wasn't, you're not going to find many news organizations saying that it was. After all, proving that it wasn't him screwing something up will be difficult because he screws a lot of things up. He got an idiom wrong when the idiom consists of two words. Most reputable ones will have their one phrasing for what it was, but they won't be as definite as you had in mind.
Unfortunately, I know some people for whom it isn't that they don't know how to do something about it, but that they don't care to do something about it. They're aware that their data is being copied, they're aware that they can do at least some things to reduce it, and, since these are people talking to me, they have someone willing to guide them through some of those options, and they still choose not to. Mostly, I try to ignore that these people exist. I focus on those who do want to prevent this and provide guidance to them, but that group who chooses not to is real.
They could write that question in many ways to try to optimize the number of people saying they are willing to pay for it. I'm willing to pay for it. If you increase my bill by 0.1% and give me unlimited access worldwide, I'll pay for it preemptively. Those could probably be pushed a bit and I'd still be willing. However, I expect that it will actually take the form of a substantial increase in the bill just for the right to use the satellites at all, then extra fees for each thing the satellites are used for. If it ends up being as restricted as I predict, then I won't be buying any of it.
Then you may commission your own study asking people if they feel more, less, or equally confident than they did at a previous time of your choosing and then asking them why. Of course, if you do the study with a preexisting assumption, it may have some flaws. For example, you seem to have assumed that an increased confidence is "misplaced and unearned". Leaving aside questions like can you really earn confidence anyway, it makes an assumption that they could not have valid reasons for increased confidence. My example posits a few reasons that could be valid or invalid depending on which preventative actions they took, and that is far from the only possibility.
The people surveyed were more confident. The business that sells security software wants to make sure that people know that it's still a good idea to buy their software. Maybe you could attribute part of this to people being confident in the software they bought from these guys, or at least these guys would like you to think that. Still, the company's statements and those of the people unaffiliated with them don't have to agree.
I don't think it's that surprising. Now that ransomware has existed for longer, more people have had an opportunity to think through what they would need to deal with it, to scare their directors into letting them do it, and to build some of the things they had in mind. Those don't prevent it altogether, but it does mean that they feel more confident about their ability to respond than they did when they had none of that.
If we were having a debate about whether to spend the money on an extra retrieval, your comment would be relevant.
Since there is no extra retrieval, it isn't.
If you think this is about an extra retrieval, I suggest you read it again. If you still think that, feel free to cite where this is indicated, since the latest delay is on Spacex's part.
If you assume that Chinese products will be superior (unproven) and given at the same or higher rate (unproven) and come with conditions of equal or lower concern (probably not). Not to mention that, in an environment where both countries are willing to give aid, it allows people to choose between them if not accepting assistance from both. Of course there are downsides, but it isn't as simple as you describe.
I agree. The number of times where something bad justifies firing someone is much lower than the number of times someone suggests it. My problem was that, even if we decided that something egregious enough had happened, they named someone who, for all we know, did nothing wrong. At least physical security has an improvement to make; although they caught the person, they were probably tasked with not letting him in in the first place and did not succeed at doing that. However, it would still take something extreme for me to conclude that their failure to do so required firing somebody.
Except by their comment, it was a 4-digit code. They were told that it had five digits, and their five digit string worked, but only because the repeated digit wasn't even read in. So this tells us that it was only four digits and repeating a digit wasn't allowed.
With ten digits, the number of combinations using four digits and no repetition would be 10*9*8*7 = 5040, or 2:48:00 at two seconds per combination. A five-digit no repeated digit code would be six times as many. Still not good, but a much less intense version of not good. If the repeated entry had put obvious marks on the keypad though, that would make only 24 combinations which would be much easier to crack.
The article makes it clear that this person used physical access. Fire the physical security director if you like, although you might want to figure out how they got access to the things they did. From the lack of detail, we don't know that this person had any system access at all. If they walked in and then smashed some important computers with a rock, that would work with the information the article gives us.
"Every now and then, I like to think of humanoid (or generally bio-inspired) robotics as a quest to better understand how we, and nature, works, much more so than something utilitarian with an industrial purpose."
Wouldn't we get better information about how we and nature work by studying those directly? Hoping that our designs for robots will tell us those things seems much less reliable. Sure, it may happen that something we built ends up doing what something in nature did to solve a problem, and seeing the robot do it will explain something that was always puzzling people who didn't understand why some bird was also doing it. I also anticipate that we will see a robot doing something and assume that nature works that way when it never did. Robots will react differently to humans because they have different resources and constraints. Science fiction often included a lot of robots which were just very literal humans, but there is a lot about the human which we don't need or want to copy when we make it mechanical.
Another type is companies that should have created a better UI, didn't, and hope that the LLM will do it for them. For example, some sites that are mostly used as price comparison sites but do their best to hide it. They know that the users are coming to see a list of prices and, where the products differ, the relevant details, but they won't make as much money giving them that as giving them a list of suggestions ordered by how much money the site operators can get for the user choosing them. Those sites can still be used to get the data the user wants, but the UI makes it trickier. And although my example posits such a site where the choice to do it badly was deliberate, that's not all of them either. Some of them are trying to provide the best UI, but the things they're comparing are complex enough that you can't just give someone a list of choices by price; they have to do some comparison themselves with the data you've given them. A good UI would give them filters that they can use to narrow down their choices, but that would take manual effort to design those filters. Theoretically, a functioning LLM would do this for them. In practice, it will mostly break or skip important things, but that's for users to notice rather than the site's maintainers.
What do you think right to repair means? Do you think it means that every spare part must be offered at no more than factory cost? It doesn't. In many cases, they're not even required to make spare parts available themselves. They can leave that to secondhand devices, original parts manufacturers, or even third-party manufacturers copying them when patents allow. Proposals differ, so some do require the companies to make the parts available, but even those are limited to parts those manufacturers already keep around for their own use.
None of this will eliminate the problem of a device that could be fixed but the effort required makes it too difficult to do economically. It was also not intended to. What it was intended to eliminate, and it would, is the situation where the device would be relatively easy to repair economically but the manufacturer has intentionally prevented you from being able to do it by forbidding the sale of a component that they've designed to be incompatible by making tiny changes from an existing standard part, using software to block the installation of a new part, or trying to create terms for anyone permitted to repair the device.
I think you'll find they have those. Laws against theft have been there from the beginning; theft is one of those basic crimes that have been there since law version 1.0. If you're expecting a law to exist which makes it impossible to steal, then you need the Justice Field from Red Dwarf, and we'll need better tech for that. Of course, Apple could have voluntary parts pairing which could be used for this goal without making secondhand parts unusable, but that would mean fewer people buying new devices, so they've chosen not to.
My laptop has 32 GB of RAM. Try to find a tablet that can do that.
I can have multiple drives installed in something with a 13-inch screen. Find a tablet that can do that.
"It's great for multitasking - every window can have its own screen. Try doing that with a laptop.": Yes, my laptop actually does have ports through which I can connect it to multiple screens. It's got a GPU that can drive those screens.
Are you recognizing why laptops and tablets are very different, with the laptops often being better?
Incidentally, 128 GB of RAM or multiple high-end GPUs aren't impossible to put into a laptop. They're just expensive, but your desktop probably wasn't too cheap either. The laptops that can do that are intentionally modular. They are not what I use because I don't need that much graphics on the go. What I do need there is the ability to connect to many types of peripherals, run programs intended to run on desktop operating systems, and run virtual machines, all with the ability to pick it up and move to a different place. A laptop does it. A tablet doesn't.
This doesn't make desktops or tablets bad. A tablet might not do what I need, but there are plenty of cases where a big phone with all the software limitations of that phone is just fine for a user. Just as a tablet is the right device for something you do, a laptop is the right device for things I do and I'm far from unique in that.
Except that laptops can run the more capable software that also runs on desktops, and they can be used with the same peripherals as desktops can. Tablets are usually encumbered with mobile operating systems and don't transition well or at all to larger peripherals. A tablet connected to a Bluetooth keyboard is not as useful as a laptop, but it is similarly sized and comes with a bonus that you have multiple batteries, either of which can cause difficulty if it runs flat.
"Note this means there is no question of compensation for time spent in jail as there might be for someone whose conviction was quashed/reversed years after imprisonment (I'm not sure this is a thing in the US)"
It can be, especially if there was misconduct in law enforcement, prosecutorial, or judicial matters. It wouldn't apply to a pardoned or commuted person though.
Except many of your examples didn't show that at all. When the authortarian leadership is evil, then they're not ruling legitimately and people aren't obeying happily. Several of your examples show people disobeying violently, which is quite a difference, even if at the end the disobedient peasants are killed and the leaders keep leading. There is a major difference between a monarch being universally respected and a monarch acting like dictators do but being successful about it.
And now you're not even talking about science fiction, but fantasy. And there I agree with you, though not on the nationalist stereotype. One of the problems I have that makes me dislike some fantasy is the way unrealistic monarchies exist and the plots that only make sense if authoritarian politics worked in a way it normally doesn't. Not that your example is of that, since as I understand them without having read them, the Game of Thrones monarchs were rather nasty people, not universally revered ones. But Americans didn't invent that, nor do British writers avoid it.
You should consider how many of those, not all but quite a few, were either specifically pointing out that these were bad things or were set in worlds that were intentionally flawed. Most of those were not intended to be utopian. True, the hierarchy in Brave New World didn't topple at the end, dismantled for egalitarianism, but that ending wasn't supposed to be a happy one. Star Wars gives you a lot of different stories, most of which I don't know, but the first one was being ruled by an emperor who was kind of an evil guy, what with all the mass murdering, and the heroes intended to remove him, not to make themselves emperor instead, but to put a republic in place. Whether they actually did that is something I don't know because it got a bit boring after a while, but even if they didn't, I don't think that would have been written as a positive.
I think you're making a mistake by assuming that science fiction is intended to be or should be utopian. Just because a futuristic utopia might have similar technology or aesthetic senses as some of it doesn't make that. A lot of it is explicitly dystopian, either totally where everything is terrible or intentionally making a world where technology made things worse. Many more are aiming for a flawed world like ours, where the advances in science didn't miraculously make humans nice and we still have the same kind of challenges we've always had. Hierarchies exist today, and I don't see a reason to assume that they will inevitably decline. Maybe that's a message to us, saying that we have to do the work ourselves to make societal changes we want.
"Actually, it's not but through precedence it has become "everybody knows" rather than enshrined in law."
Yes, the sentence "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." is so ambiguous. Let's defer to something else to see what it means. Surely it wasn't meant to apply after the 1860s. I'm sure they just forgot to write the "unless it is not a former slave, in which case you can decide on a whim whether they are".
Maybe it's a bad idea, in which case they can remove it. All they have to do is pass another constitutional amendment reading "That being born here makes you a citizen thing, not anymore." which you can campaign for if you desire.
It generally takes more than a couple hours of shutdown for someone to start making those. For one thing, the person who makes the video has to test that their method works, at least often enough that people buy the thing they said to, and that won't be an option until the service is offline. You can't know how to get around an ISP block until there is an ISP block and you can see how it's done. I remain convinced that, if it had shut down for longer, someone would want to access it and they would have described their way for doing it. It probably wouldn't appeal to users in the long term because the service would be degraded to some degree and all the people using it to make money would have stopped, but someone would have done it in the short term.
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