Alright, thank you for the information! I still think that those machines are unnecessary but I can see how they are at least not making things worse.

No paper trail still seems like insanity though, especially if auditing comes down to a non-technical person with “training” connecting some box to the machines that then tells them it’s OK.

How does the auditing work in these cases?

Also I found news reports about some US states still using machines without paper trail…

Counting by hand is fine. I see no value in the process being instantaneous. Especially not compared to the monetary cost and organizational overhead.

But what’s the point? Count everything by hand instead of relying on the machine to report anomalies, do exit polls to satisfy the news cycle. This seems too important to introduce an ultimately opaque machine into and also costs a lot for zero gain.

And then there are also the machines that so take over the process more thoroughly.

The right thing would be to abandon the concept altogether. Paper is accessible and obvious to everybody, auditing an election machine isn’t. Just keep it simple, even if it takes longer.

The one thing they are right about IMO is that voting machines are dangerous, useless garbage that endangers the integrity of the election protests.

The way they used them to do so wasn’t on my list, but still.

EDIT: Wow, so many downvotes. Remember when these concerns were held by mostly left wing techy people? You don’t have to love them now because Trump hates them/uses their presence to spread FUD. The fact that that works should be a strike against having them, FFS! You might think they are fine now but to regular people they are still opaque and scary.

That’s true, the reason I mentioned it is because you asked if it’s our place to interfere, prime directive style. I don’t think we have a moral reason to not interfere with some¹ species in our cultivated/managed spaces. It makes a lot more sense to me to have large national parks and other conservation areas where human interference is minimized.

¹ Usually it’s only some, not all. Probably because wolves, in this case, capture a lot of people’s imaginations. Which is awesome, but it’s also a bias some people have.

Is it really our place to interfere?

We already have, massively.

The lawmakers still lacked foresight. The real mistake was to not either force browser vendors to solve this on their end (cookie options SUCK on all browsers) or to make Do Not Track legally binding.

I’d have to get used to the syntax and writing my own scripts but if the majority of Linux distros switched to it tomorrow I’d enjoy it.

I don’t think I wrote more than one or two init scripts during my years of using Gentoo, the packages usually come with them. The newer syntax looks like you can get by with just a few variables and a dependency definition, not that different from a unit file I think.

Do you have to write and maintain your own init scripts, or is that created during installation?

Packages should come with the necessary scripts (on Gentoo and Alpine they do), but if they don’t for some reason then writing them is pretty simple. I think the updated layout really only needs dependencies and a couple variables defined.

Void uses Runit which is even simpler, you have one directory per service and at least a script called “run” in there which gets executed by the supervisor. The is usually just one line, that’s all it takes to make a service work. It also has the supervisor take care of handling logging, similar to what Systemd does. I think it’s a very clean, modern take on classic init, except that dependency/ordering doesn’t exist - it just retries until things fall into place. Works well though.

I’m just glad I chose arch instead of Gentoo. I got plenty of will power to learn something new but waiting hours or even days for a bunch of software to compile was too much for me.

But the documentation is really good and I like the simplicity of OpenRC. Give Void or Alpine a go if you want to dip your toes into something similar, but without all the compiling.

Man… in a better world Nintendo wouldn’t have a case because liberating encryption keys is the basis for interoperability, which is good for, you know, competition. Competition is good. Or so I’ve heard.

You already are on a Linux sub, so… Maybe you can start here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHyaFBsxy1s

I love how a software bug that scrambled his newsgroup subscriptions introduced him to the fandom, that’s so unbelievably nerdy.

But honestly: Those pipeline memes kinda rub me the wrong way. It feels like fucking with people’s identity by way of stereotyping for… I don’t know, a laugh, if that’s even the point? Saying this as someone who completely fits the furry in IT stereotype.

Add: many people seem to be calling Fascistist “Nazis” nowadays. That’s so confusing to me, as if they don’t know that Nazism is a particular form of Fascism. While Fascism in all its varieties and guises should be the true denominator for trouble, and is the enemy of democracy.

The AfD has been taken over by literal Neo-Nazis that see themselves in the tradition of the NSDAP though, calling them that is correct.

several eyewitness sources maintain Hitler was a vegetarian because of his concern for animal suffering, noting that he was often distressed by images of animal cruelty and suffering, and was an antivivisectionist.

Fucker should’ve gone one animal further.

The guy people keep partly citing when they bring up the “paradox of tolerance”, for example.

Violence is supposed to be the last resort to deal with them, I don’t see how this is in any way helpful, good or justified.