Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a legitimate implementation of such a system. It will absolutely be intentionally flawed in ways that allow the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans citizens. That’s 100% what always happens with Republican initiatives to “protect” elections. It will be made trivial to “accidentally” remove legitimate voter registrations, and a labyrinthian bureaucratic process to correct them.

Portillo’s is what I was thinking of.

There is a popular place near me where the line could be as long as the photo and they would get you through in a few minutes. Of course that involves having several people walking the cars getting orders and taking money. The window hands out the food as fast as the drivers can pull up. It’s insane but impressive.

If you are in the appropriate lane for the turn you intend to make, and the car in front of you isn’t moving, I’m pretty sure the law doesn’t require you to pick a different destination or ram the car ahead of you. What the law should be is a different question, but cop you would just see a bunch of tickets thrown out in quick succession. I don’t know what that realistically means for the job, but it can’t be good.

Not really. They used to have pretty good privacy agreements. I don’t know about now. They do supply agrigate information to pharmaceutical companies, but that has become a pretty fungible resource. The only big consumer of individual DNA information is law enforcement, and that’s more of an expense than an income flow, since reviewing warrants and providing responses costs money.

An important lesson in infosec is that the best way to reduce the cost of discovery and warrant compliance is to regularly delete any data you don’t need or aren’t legally required to retain. Companies like this don’t have that option. Data is both an asset and a liability.

When it’s an inexpensive product that nobody ever has a reason to buy twice yet remains an ongoing cost for the company? (They keep the data available for review and continue to update it with useful information as knowledge of genetic traits and lineages grows). That’s not a way to build an ongoing cash flow to cover expenses. Especially when all the people inclined to be interested have already purchased.

Shit, Oracle was down in the low $400B range in May. Apparently being evil pays well in the current administration.

A little searching finds only one company that really fits the bill. Costco has a market cap of $433B and had a reported $14.8B cash on hand as of May 11. That’s an interesting possibility that I wouldn’t have guessed. Costco is less evil than most big corporations, so that’s a little hopeful if I got it right.

Oracle comes close with a market cap of $583B. That’s indeed over $400B, but that would make the description a bit weird. In any case, Oracle makes more sense from a business angle. Unfortunately, they are near the top of the evil scale.

It’s not a great business model if you think about it. Customers pay a small fee once then never again.

Those are IPv6 addresses that work a bit differently than IPv4. Most customers only get assigned a single IPv4 address, and even a lot of big data centers only have one or two blocks of 256 addresses. The smallest allocation of IPv6 for a single residential customer is typically a contiguous block of the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses mentioned.

If Google’s security team is even marginally competent, they will recognize those contiguous blocks and treat them as they would a single IPv4 address. Every address in that block has the same prefix, and it’s actually easier to track on those prefixes than on the entire address.

2nm is 20A on the agnstrom scale used by Intel, and Intel has an 18A process that was projected to hit production late in 2025. TSMC isn’t projecting anything better until 16A in 2027.

I have no idea how Trump’s trashing of the Chips Act factors in, but it does still seem to be a real race.

That’s the only reason I’ve ever done much of anything in shell script. As a network administrator I’ve worked many network appliances running on some flavor of Unix and the one language I can count on to be always available is bash. It has been well worth knowing for just that reason.

Most of Trump’s cabinet ranges from morally indifferent to outright hostile to human beings. The only exception I think I see is RFK Jr. who is just batshit insane.