The other commenter have described the challenge, but I’d like to clarify the terminology, since the distinctions might not be obvious. For tech, we generally speak of the separate qualities of being Free (as in, use it however you want) and Open (aka being open to study, reimplement, and extend). If both qualities are had, then that’s called Free And Open.

The most common designation is for software, which if both Free and Open, then that’s Free And Open-Source Software (FOSS). Examples include the Linux kernel (GPL license) and FreeBSD in its entirety (MIT license). This means you can remake the software and use it how you like.

For hardware, there’s also the equivalent concept of Free And Open, and that means the PCB design can be remade and used for whatever you want. If you wish to use Free And Open hardware for war or for hobby use, that’s entirely up to you.

But there’s also the realm of silicon, which is the most esoteric and specialized, and there’s a lot less Free And Open silicon designs available. For example, the x86 CPU architecture is not Free nor Open. It is patented and its logic is proprietary and trade secrets of Intel, AMD, and Via. They document the behavior of registers, but they never publish the silicon designs so that you could make your own at home.

ARM is slightly different, in that they’ll gladly help you build your own ARM silicon (eg Apple Silicon system-on-chips) but you need to pay them a license. So it’s not Free nor Open because: 1) you have to pay money, and 2) the plans aren’t available for examination until you pay up.

LoRA silicon is more akin to x86, because they just don’t publish anything except the register behavior. The license to use the LoRA design is baked into the sale price that the LoRA Alliance charges. And yet still, you at home receive no right to remix or examine that silicon design yourself, unless you do actual reverse engineering. And even then, they have patents.

LoRA is not Open nor Free silicon. And it never claimed to be. Meshtastic and MeshCore use Free and Open hardware and software but that’s it. You do not have as many rights to the silicon as you do for the hardware and software.

Kings and queens are known by their first name

I can concede this.

the distinction is because of the assumption the predecessor is alive while Junior and The Third are around

Whereas this cannot possibly make sense, because knowing which person is which would still be relevant after they’re all dead. See Pliny The Elder versus Pliny The Younger, Alexander Dumas (father vs son), and MLK (senior and junior).

Seeing as people can change their own name to whatever they want, including if there is no preceding generation with that name, then no, there’s no particular issue with suffixes on names.

I’d like to point out that in the English-speaking world, the English (and now British) Monarchy increments the generation number without regard for the immediately preceding generation. As in, Elizabeth II was crowned 300+ years after Elizabeth I. So it is well accepted that ordering doesn’t necessarily matter and there is no hard rule against it.

On the titular question, I would say that there’s a realm in English where it’s possible to omit the subject. However, it is generally considered necessarily terse and wouldn’t be suitable for general conversation, due to distilling the language down to what essentially is a series of verbs strung together. That realm would be commands or instructions, with the specific example of highway/motorway signage.

It’s a unique challenge for English highway signs, to convey exactly what’s important but also not be too long to read. There is a physical limit for why “DO NOT ENTER” is preferred over “Automobiles May Not Turn Right Onto This Road”. In the UK, they even reduce this to “NO ENTRY”, which is in line with the pattern of “no parking” or “no lorries over 3 tonnes”.

Even more reduced are the words “EXIT ONLY” which means “this lane will soon terminate, vehicles in this lane will be forced to exit the highway, and vehicles should change lanes to remain on the highway”. All of that is from the very context of a road, made common through the context of driver training, signage, and lane markings.

This is one of the reasons why a language like Japanese gets “lost” in translation

I would argue that translation is not the exercise of converting words like-for-like, but to convey the same meaning or experience in the target language. As an example, expletives in other languages will reference different things, be it name-calling or dishonorable comparisons in Japanese, genitalia in English, excrement in German, etc. But there is no requirement that a mild expletive in Japanese needs to be perfectly preserved into English. Rather, the overall work when read in English should use an equivalently mild expletive, with proper consideration for what the original audience was. So if the Japanese source was a children’s anime and light high-school insults are in the dialogue, the English translation might render this as minced oaths in English. The character building should be mostly identical for the English audience.

But done only mechanically and without artistry, such a translation is going to sound very “American” and lose much of the soul of the original. IMO, this is something that older Crunchyroll translations suffered from, and fansubs did a much better job of preserving the dialogue faithfully. Even while doing this, some parts of the language are necessarily untranslatable, since things like post-nominal honorifics don’t exist in English. As a result, some fansubs might stylistically choose to always render the honorific every time – eg spelling out Kami-sama rather than translating as God.

This is in tandem to other subtitle-specific considerations like keeping the surname-then-given name ordering, so that the subtitles read in the same order as they are spoken in full (eg Kudo Shinichi) and correctly shortening to just the surname when addressed as such (eg Kudo-san or Kudo-sama).

Even still, it could be acceptable to translate as “Mr Kudo” or “Master Kudo”, if that’s the vibe that the source material was going for. Translation is, as I understand it, a holistic work. And perhaps the best example I can cite to is the English translation of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Ken Liu did the translation, and made an explicit choice to hew towards Chinese terminology, explained in footnotes, because the ordering of the cosmic velocities (first, second, third) is more clearly a stair step towards space travel, rather than using the typical terms of “orbital velocity” and “escape velocity” in English.

The English translation intentionally makes itself clear as a translation, but care was taken to make sure it is uniquely from eastern source material yet still perfectly readable in English for someone that knows nothing of Chinese 20th Century history or much of anything about space travel. In that sense, it is accessible sci-fi, where even us Americans will understand the great work that Liu Cixin set into ink.

A year ago, I had this fun comment about if necromancy were possible in a courtroom setting. And I think the follow-up is relevant here:

TL;DR: rules of evidence would still apply to the undead, and judges must take care to balance the probative value of evidence with any prejudicial quality it may carry. (to be abundantly clear, this was a schittpost lol)

even when you have a live body on the stand about to give testimony, it is essential to lay the foundation as to who they are and their legitimacy.

If a masked vigilante’s legitimacy as a vigilante cannot be proven independently – a tough act since they would want to maintain their secret identity, coupled with the possibility of copycats or false flag operatives – then a jury or the bench would be reluctant to give their testimony much value. It’d be no different if you or I waltzed into court and proclaimed to be the world’s foremost expert on bitemark analysis and underwater basket weaving, but that you just have to “trust me, bro” on that claim. No reasonable person would believe that claim.

Now, your question focuses on whether a masked vigilante can testify but with a proviso to protect their interests. To that question, the answer is: maybe. Sometimes a witnesss (eg FBI Special Agent) can have their identity protected being exposed in open court, but still allow all parties (clients and their attorneys) to know the witness’s identity, for the purpose of fact checking. While there’s a fairly strong interest that trials be mostly open, a Special Agent’s identity should generally be protected, since that could be the very essence of their occupation.

And you could maybe say the same thing for a masked vigilante. But in the opposite, one could argue that the general public has an overwhelmingly strong interest in learning the identity of a masked vigilante, which might suggest that the court deny the vigilant the benefit of a private testimony.

Still, the vigilante could proceed to give testimony, unmasked if so needed. However, if the question was tweaked to be “can a court force a masked vigilante to testify, and thus reveal their identity?”, the answer in USA law is no.

Specifically, the Fifth Amendment guarantees that no one can be forced to testify if the testimony can be used against them later. So either the testimony isn’t taken at all, or that they are immunized for anything that they testify about. Those are the only two remaining options that satisfy the 5th Amendment. And so, since a masked vigilante would have potential criminal liability for past crimes, the government (federal or state) cannot force them to answer questions on the stand, without first granting immunity. If they offer no immunity, the vigilante can simply reply that they’re invoking their right from the 5th Amendment, and no harm can come to them for doing so; being harmed for invoking a right would make said right into a meaningless thing.

But if the prosecutor decides that it’s super important to hear what the vigilante has to say, then they can grant immunity. Unlike a pardon which is a gift that a person can choose to decline, immunity is unilaterally granted, and the recipient cannot reject it. Once that’s done, someone can be forced to testify (eg locked in jail until they will talk), since there is no longer a risk of the testimony coming back to harm themselves later.

Note: those words could be entirely damning to somebody else, and there’s no such thing as “third party Fifth Amendment” rights. This is almost always the reason why the prosecutor would grant immunity, to get the compelled testimony from underlings or witnesses necessary to convict a bigger target. If a masked vigilante was the only witness to documents about accounting fraud, which were later burned, that could be really useful when trying to pursue white collar crime, even if the cost is to give up any possibility of prosecuting the property damage crimes that the masked vigilante may have committed.

The thing is, the Internet routing protocol BGP delivers basically everything that a mesh network requires, except for the physical data links that carry the data. Keeping things short, BGP is a way to declare where certain IP addresses can be found. So an example announcement BGP would be something like “2608:120::/32 can be found at AS721”, where AS stands for Autonomous Network, a subnetwork that is controlled by a single entity. In this case, that IPv6 range belongs to the USA Department of Defense (DoD) and AS721 is the identifier for their network.

Now, the trick is to figure out how your own AS can reach the AS of your destination, which is no different than a mesh: the DoD’s AS721 is solely connected to AS3356 (the massive ISP named “Level 3”), which is a very likely connected to the upstream AS of your link to the Internet, which means there is a valid path from your AS to the DoD.

Whenever an intermediate AS disappears from the global Internet, its former peers will reroute through other links to maintain a path to the largest number of AS’s (as in, the Internet). In this sense, having multiple links to different AS’s is important for redundancy, and is no different than a mesh network having multiple RF paths.

Finally, if multiple link failures occur – say, a Tier 1 ISP goes completely down – then the network becomes fragmented, but traffic within each fragment will still pass. This is akin to a mesh between two cities, where the mountain-top repeater is struck by lightning. Locals in each town can still send messages, but not over the hill to the next town.

Is BGP perfect? Heavens no. And it has its own issues with maliciously-crafted announcements. But everything that BGP does is analogous to what mesh networks do. It’s merely that the participants are highly commercialized today, whereas in the 80s, it was mostly universities and a few defense contractors experimenting.

The technology is basically here, but it’s how it gets used that will dictate out how history will be written.

Setting aside the Forgejo issues for a moment, I can’t quite see the logic behind the author’s description of a “carrot disclosure”.

As written, it’s a third option for disclosure, beyond 1) coordinated disclosure (often 90 days for the vendor to fix things) or 2) full disclosure (immediately going public, esp when the vulnerability is believed to be actively exploited). But what the author describes as the carrot is to publish only the output of a proof-of-concept, and then the onus is on the vendor to figure out both the vulnerability and the fixes.

This seems wildly irresponsible to me, to put the effort into writing a working PoC but then to willfully withhold it, so as to basically force the vendor into a wild goose chase. And that’s the best case scenario, when the PoC is actually legit. At worst, it’s a DoS against a vendor (causing them to re-audit code to find a bug that doesn’t actually exist, eg hallucinated AI slop) or is a form of defamation to scare users away.

Then there’s the issue of when it’s not a “vendor” per-se but a group of volunteers of an open-source project, which I will distinguish from commercial vendors as “maintainers”. Is it ethical to withhold an already-written PoC from FOSS maintainers, whom often do not have the material capabilities to do a full-scale audit when given basically no clues?

To be clear, I’m not a security researcher and have done zero disclosures of any form. But if I ever ran a project and received a so-called carrot disclosure, why shouldn’t I immediately call their bluff and treat it as full-disclosure? This situation seems like Schrodinger’s Cat, where the only way to rip away the uncertainty is to throw open the box. Worse case, the project suffers the reputational hit for having a legit vulnerability. But best case, the vulnerability is non-existent. But what this supposed “third way” purports to do is no different than sowing the seeds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt amongst users. Someone tell me how this isn’t one step away from extortion.

I think game theory would say that any and all recipients of “carrot” disclosures should always call the bluff, immediately and vocally. I don’t see any way for such disclosures to be anything but unnecessarily antagonistic. I refuse to credit the term with any legitimacy.

I’m not familiar with cereal bags being accepted for recycling at grocery stores – although I’m aware that grocery store recycling in California has deep issues regarding implementation – but regarding why a chip bag is different than a cereal bag, my guess is that it has to do with the former being air tight.

Chip bags are intentionally filled with gas (usually nitrogen) in order to preserve the contents for a long shelf life. Rather conveniently, this also helps the chips not smash up against other chip bags in the same box, at the cost of fitting fewer bags into a shipping container. As such, chip bags have to be air tight, and mylar is good at that, as evidenced by mylar balloons that keep helium inside for far longer than a latex balloon (to the sadness of every electricity provider on Earth).

Whereas I suspect the clear plastic – maybe polyethylene? – bags used for cereal have different requirements, because a cereal box already provides mechanical protection against other boxes, and an expectation that cereals (a bona fide breakfast foodstuff, compared to chips which have always been categorized as a snack food) will be eaten in quantities that make recyclability a priority; this is a guess.

I also think cereals might historically have been just free-floating inside the box, in the same way that dishwasher power detergent is still packaged within a thick cardstock box, with a pour-out metal spout. That said, this citation seems to indicate that cereal bags are in-fact liners, which would suggest the primary reason is one of food safety, if contact directly with the inside of the box would be a problem.

And this kinda makes sense to me, since nobody would want to eat soggy cereal if a bit of rainwater seeped through the box and contacted the food.

It could make sense, but what would be gained? A geographically-broader mesh sounds nice, until you realize that it means messages will go across the IP link and continue propagating on the other end, tying up the RF spectrum, even for traffic that didn’t need to cross the IP link.

It also detracts from what a fair number of people use the mesh for: comms without reliance on fallible singular links. Single points of failure are not ideal in a mesh, and an IP link would be adding exactly that.

Note that Reticulum has a much more developed routing structure, so that flood messages do not propagate everywhere uselessly. In that regard, Reticulum has learned what Ethernet and 802.11 WiFi have known for decades, while Meshtastic finds itself playing catch-up.

A managed flood is still a flood, so introducing a trunk link will increase the “broadcast domain”, to use Ethernet parlance. For two quiet, small meshes, a link between them might be alright. But for two busy, small meshes, the extra floods are just noise and drown out traffic.

In the best possible scenario, a BIOS/UEFI password lock will prevent an adversary from using the computer as-is. If the adversary has an objective to quickly fence the computer, then this objective is foiled. Note that preventing the computer from physical access would also foil this objective, since that prevents the adversary from even accessing the machine.

But that’s the best case. In a more-worse case scenario, the adversary wants to steal data from the computer. A firmware password will be useless if the adversary removes the HDD or SSD from the machine. This is, instead, correctly solved with drive-level encryption, using a password or smart card to unlock.

The reason why open-source firmwares (BIOS/UEFI) might be uninterested in implementing a password is because: 1) preventing physical access is more effective, and 2) because it’s arguably a form of security theatre: commercial firmware vendors include a password feature because some customer once asked for it, but not with security as a well-thought objective. Open-source projects have a habit of not implementing pointless features.

TL;DR: physical access to a machine is fatal to any and all security protections

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_referendums_in_Switzerland

Switzerland is also a rarity where there isn’t quite a separate head of state (eg UK Monarch, German President) but also the head of government role is done by a council of seven, where the majority decision is what happens. So the legislative body writes the law and the council of seven is tasked with executive power to carry out the law.

The modern Swiss constitution (1848) took inspiration from the American constitution (1789), but rather than a consolidated head of state/government like the American President, they wanted to hew even closer to the long-standing ideals of democracy amongst the Cantons, to also avoid concentrating too much power to individuals. Thus, even though the Swiss Federal Council rotates the title of president every year in turn, it confers zero extra powers.

Like with all things, it’s a matter of degree. Democracy and socialism are not inherently incompatible, but can be mixed together at different ratios. For example, a democratic socialist society could follow in the Swiss model of direct democracy, meaning everyone has a say in the policy decisions. Such policy decisions include the law but also how to utilize the means of production, which the state owns entirely.

Whereas another democratic socialist society could realize their democracy through a representative model, where citizens elect a local representative that goes to the capital and votes in a state committee on how to amend the law or utilize the means of production, which the state owns entirely. Here, political power is wielded by a committee but the complete socialist ownership is intact.

Yet another democratic socialist society could be much softer on the state ownership of all the means of production. The state might own the utilities, roads, schools, and all land, but may permit certain collectives to privately own businesses that generate value and to distribute those earnings equally amongst themselves. This could be considered a transitional step, since it allows for a controlled amount of capitalist-style development to occur, while avoiding huge concentrations of private capital. But it could also be a step backwards if the state already fully-owned the means of production but then voted to release some of it to small co-ops.

While words have to mean something to be useful at all, I wouldn’t spend too much time trying to fit all possibilities into neat categories. Ultimately, socioeconomics are fluid.

We are all currently traveling through time, though at a forward rate of 1 second per second (within your stationary frame of reference, since time dilation is a thing). But I take that you mean “time travel” as in advancing into the future at a faster rate, or going into the past.

In both cases, we do currently have the means of hermetically-sealed transportation. This is how, I believe, moon samples were collected in the mid 20th Century, since there was a possibility that alien life would be contagious to humans or that humans would destroy any samples of alien life. I think Tom Scott or someone did a video on the topic.

So while the biological risk would complicate time travel and visiting other humans, that alone doesn’t make time travel “impossible” because we could just have the travelers stay in their TARDIS or whatever. Like how people signed wills in 2020 atop automobile hoods.

There are plenty of other reasons why time travel is impossible though.

I’ve not used it, but have heard decent things about Kagi, a paid search engine. Supposedly, it finds things like how old Yahoo or old Google worked, without AI (but is optionally available?), and no ads.

I would think the major barrier to entry is the business model: ad revenue goes to those that can deliver results. Google AdSense has dominated that realm for years, so it would take a major upfront investment to challenge them on that. Not much different than how it’s hard to compete with established airlines to a particular airport that they already serve. Economies of scale tend towards consolidation.

In California, a U turn is considered a left turn that keeps going. As a result, a U turn is legal anywhere that a left turn is legal, except when signs are posted otherwise. So in a left-turn pocket/lane, it is both reasonable and expected that people will make left turns, some of which will continue into a full 180 degree turn. People who do U turns are doing what is allowed, and they have every right to do so. If this seems like a problem, then talk to your transportation department to restrict U turns.

I’m not aware of any aspect of a U turn procedure that would be any different than than a standard 90 degree turn: use turn signals, look for oncoming traffic, look for pedestrians, turn slowly as required by the radius, roll out of the turn with careful acceleration.

American English speaker here. While I would understand what “to auction away” means, I’m not aware of anyone here in California that would say it like that. Usually, I would say “to auction off”, which follows in a long series of other “X off” verbs, like “to bake off” or “to shake off”, all of which usually involve some sort of adversary or competition.

Note that we do use the verb “to give away” but that would mean a gift without compensation, which is definitely not an auction.

Civil forfeiture and DEA is a separate problem unto itself, and you’ve always hit on the key points: DEA operates within the country, whereas customs is at port of entries. DEA’s corruption and geographic reach mean they have caused far more problems than any customs agent, in pursuit of a 1990s zeal that “drugs are bad” and expanding that into a parallel law enforcement system, despite already having a federal law enforcement department: the FBI. Civil forfeiture should be abolished as unconstitutional, violating due process, equal protection, and property law.

So yes, once you’re in the country, there is a risk to carry around large sums of cash. But that’s hardly connected to the customs declaration requirement, and certainly cannot be connected to the declaration requirement on the way out.

When entering or exiting the USA, the rule is that cash or financial instruments need to be declared above $10,000, but you can bring as much as you want. So bringing a literal suit case of Swiss francs worth $5 million USD is perfectly fine, provided you tell the customs agent.

While I can’t really advise going to the USA right now, it’s not like they will confiscate cash above $10,000. The particular phrase used in most places is “freedom of capital”, meaning that money can flow into or out of the country without significant impediment. The entire USA financial sector relies upon freedom of capital, whether that’s electronically or – if need be – with bundles of cash.

Declaring cash helps prevent money laundering, since people intending to secretly move money would not want to declare to customs. The threshold is intentionally set so that normal people going on holiday with cash or travelers checks (yes, I’m aware it’s 2026) won’t be burdened by the rule.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/3138/

Please let such a thing never exist!

I think the market for each is quite a bit different. Prop guns, whether functioning or not, are often regulated in law as “replica firearms” because while they may (or not) be functional, the issue is that they are intentionally similar to the real thing. Hence, some jurisdictions have limits on who can sell replica firearms and who can buy them.

One rank below firearms and replica firearms, air/pellet guns and BB guns propel small balls or shuttlecocks (?) made of metal using compressed air or spring power. These could still be harmful to people, but aren’t usually fatal, which makes them effective for pest control or target practice, in lieu of live firearms. Accordingly, these are often regulated like how knives are: don’t just hand a pellet gun to a child without supervision, and don’t assault people. Otherwise, do as thou whilst.

Meanwhile, airsoft guns propels small plastic balls using springs, compressed air, or electro-pneumatic pressure. By sheer virtue of having less density, a plastic airsoft projectile carries less energy than a BB pellet, and certainly a lot less than a live-fire bullet. Also, whereas firearms can attain supersonic velocities, the speed of sound puts a firm cap on what a plastic, ball-shaped projectile can achieve, when not using chemical-based propulsion (ie gunpowder).

Only 8 US States regulate airsoft guns, and even those that do are not restricting them as heavily as firearms (except New Jersey?). The common requirement is that an airsoft gun should have an orange tip. That means a majority of Americans are potential customers for airsoft, and that means an environment will form that host matches, competitions, and so on. Big market means lots of producers, so lots of variety, high quality, and lower prices for all.

Whereas, what’s the market for replica firearms? Show business? Gun enthusiasts?