• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 8th, 2023

help-circle
  • How about a government-sponsored, non-profit authentication service? That is, it should be impossible to get a loan, open a line of credit, or anything else in somebody’s name, without the lending institution verifying that it’s actually on behalf of the named individual. Eliminate the security-through-obscurity technique of using bits of easily-leaked personal information as a poor substitute for actual authentication.

    I mean, (as a comparative example) I have to go through an OAuth2 consent dialog to connect a third-party app to my email account, yet somebody can saddle me with huge debts based on knowing a 9-digit number that just about everybody knows? It’s the system that’s broken, tightening up the laws on PII is just a band-aid.



  • Just spitballing here, but if I read this correctly, you pulled the Windows drive, installed Mint, and then put the Windows drive back in alongside the Mint drive? If so, that might be the issue.

    UEFI firmware looks for a special EFI partition on the boot drive, and loads the operating system’s own bootloader from there. The Windows drive has one. When you pulled the Windows drive to install Mint on another drive, Mint had to create an EFI partition on its disk to store its bootloader.

    Then, when you put the Windows disk back in, there were two EFI partitions. Perhaps the UEFI firmware was looking for the Windows bootloader in the EFI partition on the Mint disk. It would of course not find it there. In my experience, Windows recovery is utterly useless in fixing EFI boot issues.

    It’s possible to rebuild the Windows EFI bootloader files manually, but since you don’t mind blowing away both OS installs, I’d say just install Mint on the second drive while both of them are installed in the system, so the installer puts the Mint bootloader on the same EFI partition as the Windows one. With the advent of EFI, Windows will still sometimes blow away a Linux bootloader, but Linux installers are very good at installing alongside Windows. If it does get stuffed up, there’s a utility called Boot-Repair, that you can put on a USB disk, that works a lot better than Windows recovery.




  • This is madness, but since this is a hobby project and not a production server, there is a way:

    • Shrink the filesystems on the existing disks to free up as much space as possible, and shrink their partitions.
    • Add a new partition to each of the three disks, and make a RAID5 volume from those partitions.
    • Move as many files as possible to the new RAID5 volume to free up space in the old filesystems.
    • Shrink the old filesystems/partitions again.
    • Expand each RAID component partition one at a time by removing it from the array, resizing it into the empty space, and re-adding it to the array, giving plenty of time for the array to rebuild.
    • Move files, shrink the old partitions, and expand the new array partitions as many times as needed until all the files are moved.

    This could take several days to accomplish, because of the RAID5 rebuild times. The less free space, the more iterations and the longer it will take.



  • This just sounds like a bad idea, a solution in search of a problem. Sure, sudo is a setuid binary, but it’s a fairly simple program, and at some point, you have to trust the code. It’s also a very fundamental piece of the system that you want to always work, even (especially!) when other things get borked. The brief description of run0 already has too many potential points of failure.




  • I took a while to ponder this point, to respond without writing a novel. To keep it brief, I’d say that whether it’s a regressive tax depends on the structure or the tax rates. Here in the U.S., poor people most definitely do not own houses, or at least not houses in high-value locations on lot sizes anywhere near the lot sizes that rich people own. Only people with money own big lots in high-value locations, like desirable city centers.

    Our property tax system already contains terrible perverse incentives, such as taxing the value of land and buildings, which means that rich people can afford taxes on an expensive house, and middle-class people get slammed with taxes on additions and improvements to their houses.

    Poor people rent, and landlords have the same perverse inventive to avoid fixing up their properties. Their taxes are lower if they let their buildings decay, keeping them just above the condition the building code requires.




  • There’s a movement called Georgism that advocates for abolishment of all taxes, except for a land-value tax. (“Land” being any extractive natural resource use.) It’s really the only fair tax system. At the risk of oversimplifying it: All wealth comes from a combination of natural resources and labor. Natural resources belong to all of humanity, so it’s not fair to give ownership of them to well-connected individuals or firms to profit from extracting and selling them. On the other side, an individual’s labor is the only thing that people have that’s entirely their own. It’s not fair to tax individual labor, like an income tax, as nobody else should have any claim on its value. Thus, the taxes to run a society should come from the use of humanity’s limited store of natural resources/land, rather than have value which belongs to us all disappear info the pockets of a few individuals, while most people must work to justify their existence while the value of that labor is siphoned away.


  • This is an infuriating aspect of this case. The courts could have held the clinic responsible for this loss without declaring that all frozen embryos are children by invoking the “prime mover” concept. Other courts have used it in, for example, surrogacy cases. In short, that concept holds that it’s the intent of the parent(s) that matters, as the prime movers in the process of bringing a child into the world, not just the mixing of some genetic material. Those destroyed embryos could have become children, as it was the parents’ intention to do so. And if nobody intends to implant embryos, for whatever reason, without the intent to make a child, they’re merely organic material, neatly sidestepping those questions.

    But, of course, the court wanted to impose its religious orthodoxy rather than issue a sensible ruling. Now we have those thorny questions.