Plot twist: this is just corporate shilling, too, trying to convince us it’s only 15%…

In the US, we have no national ID, and no uniform way to prove citizenship. The easiest way is with a passport, but not everyone has one. Citizens with out a passport need to produce their birth certificate (or naturalization papers) to prove it. Some states have drivers licenses that meet Federal standards for passports and can be used to prove citizenship, but they also issue licenses for non-citizens leading to multiple types of drivers licenses.

Not even the infamous SSN can be used to prove citizenship, because non-citizens with work authorization will get one for tax filing purposes.

There is a Federal form: https://www.eac.gov/voters/national-mail-voter-registration-form

It looks like it is basically facilitates registering in your state. The form linked to at that site does not require you to send in proof of citizenship, but does require you to affirm you are a citizen. And that really should be good enough.

However, SCOTUS has shown that they don’t mind ignoring precedent, particularly if they can earn some sweet gratituities from it.

Right. Trump is governing like there will not be another election, but the Senate is. There are a lot of ways to read that.

I’ve read elsewhere that the Senate Leadership really, really doesn’t want to do this. Their logic is that if the Filibuster goes away, and Democrats ever achieve full control of the Presidency and Congress again, they will immediately move to:

• add justices to the supreme court
• ratify DC and PR as states, adding 4 reliable Democratic Senators and 4 or 5 Representatives
• pass anti-gerrymandering legislation

All of which couldn’t be blocked if the legislative filibuster dies.

And basically undo all the ratfucking of our system that Mitch McConnell and his friends have so painstakingly set up.

Four senior law enforcement officials familiar with the case said the FBI in Detroit apprehended a group of young individuals into custody today who were plotting some form of attack with a possible reference to Halloween.

Checking it over just defeats the purpose of AI slop. The whole point of using AI is you want to put in as little effort as possible.

They can make a better choice this Tuesday (and, more importantly, in the mid-terms next year)

In parliamentary systems, “not having a government” isn’t as catastrophic as it sounds. It varies by country, but generally speaking the Executive and Legislative branches are run together. When there is a clear party majority in the Parliament, that party gets to pick all the heads of the executive branch. When there is not a clear majority, but a coalition of parties that make up a majority, they negotiate which party gets to head which department.

When there is not even that coalition, nobody will agree on those department heads. The departments don’t grind to a halt in most cases. There are lower-level deputies who can take over day-to-day administration, and there are usually still funds available. But no big decisions can be made without the formal department head. It mainly runs in place. (And, without any majority in Parliament, odds are there are not any laws getting passed either).

In many countries, this condition of the Parliament existing with no governing majority can trigger a new election, so the Parliament can have a new chance to get out of its deadlock. Why was Belgium different? You’ll have to ask a Belgian.

What is going on in the US is much different. We have a government in place, it just can’t agree on funding executive agencies, and we have laws on the books that specifically restrict what agencies can do without funding. We could have structured things differently, but did not. Our politicians want this chaos, because they think they can gain politically from it.

Here’s the really bonkers thing: the actual budget is passed, they know exactly how much is meant for each agency. What’s been held up is actually putting that money in the account and authotizing the spending of it. We could have combined the two, and appropriated money in the same act that budgeted it. But we separate them, on purpose, to give the politicians more steps to negotiate things.

As far as I can tell, we are the only large country that separates budgets and appropriations like this. In most other countries, failure to fully fund the government would be seen as a sign of weakness in the government. But here, we have one party whose core mission is to shrink the size of Federal government. Conservatives here think that failing to fund the government shows strength.

Have you been to New Jersey? It’s quite revolting…

Is there like a programming language of some sort where a compiler converts syntax into circuitry layouts?

You are looking for something like System Verilog (Or VHDL).

Both these languages let you describe hardware. They can both go down to the circuit and transistor level, but people won’t write that by hand. Rather, they will write code that is a description of digital hardware (flip-flops and the logic between them), and then let tools synthesize their description down to individual logic cells and simple functions. Often, chip fab houses have “standard cell libraries” that implement the most common logical functions, and the tools stich them together based on the higher level description.

Then there is all the verification that needs to be done, not just verification that the design is doing what it needs to do at all times, but that every individual chip is made correctly. Defects do happen, and you want to find them as early as possible in the process. Chip companies spend considerable effort on verification.

Lots and lots of expensive tools and specialized knowledge! A good middle ground are FPGAs. These are special chips with lots of generic logic building blocks, and ways to programmatically make connections between them. You can write the same VHDL or Verilog for FPGAs, butt the tools map the logic to the FPGA vendor’s chip directly, and “programs” the chip to implement the logic. These still require tools and specialized knowledge, but much cheaper than a fully custom chip.

One of the trippy things to understand about digital logic when coming from a software background is that it is massively parallel. All the logic is ticking on each clock edge, all the time. While there may be an order to how an HDL file is written, the individual blocks in it are all operating at the same time once the design is actually running in silicon. So when you write it, you need to keep all this parallelism in mind

It depends on how big your arms are. I bet you can run around with a pistol but not with heavy guns…

At least we can use that dumb Arc de Trump plaza for something…

Wait, he’s admitting that rules apply to him? Shit, he really is about to die, isn’t he?

Federal elections here are on a set schedule, there’s no concept of a “snap” election here. The closest thing is if a Congressional seat goes vacant, they need to schedule a special election just for that seat before it can be filled.

In theory, we prevent kings here by allocating distinct powers to distinct branches of government. The problem occurs when those branches stop using the oversight powers the Constitution gives them. The American President can rule like a king – if Congress and the Courts let him.

These Colors Don’t Run!

There are two ways to interpret the question.

If you go with “will the internetworking between independent diverse networks ever go offline”, the answer to that is most definitely “no”. With so many independent entities involved, and so many redundant connections, data will find a way to be routed to where it needs to go. Perhaps a coordinated attack on undersea cables might disconnect continents from each other.

But if you go with “can the commercial Internet that companies use to sell stuff ever go offline”, I think we’ve seen that the answer to that is “yes”. As more and more commerce moves “to the cloud” I think people are ignorant about how concentrates computing in a few distinct geographical areas and companies. Yes, I am aware that those companies are very good at 24/7 operation and site reliability. Until they fire so many people that they aren’t reliable anymore.