Legislators are there to directly reflect the opinions and interests of their constituents, judges are there to have expert knowledge of the law and how it applies to each case uniquely. The first needs some form of democratic mechanism to ensure that they represent people’s current opinions, the later needs a meritocratic mechanism to ensure they are experts in the correct fields.

If judges were the only element of a court I would agree that it would be problematic to have no democratic input, but in common law systems at least that element is represented by juries who are the most powerful element of a court case as they are unchallengable arbiters of fact and drawn through sortition which is even more democratic than election.

Judges shouldnt be elected for the same reasons surgeons shouldnt be elected.

We’ve been launching nuclear reactors into space for decades (mostly RTGs) they’re just much smaller. There isnt any chance of them exploding or anything when exposed to radiation, but yes the chance of the rocket failing, exploding and showering radioactive material over the ocean is why this has to be done incredibly carefully if it is done.

Any excuse you use to explain why you can use a slur is exactly that: an excuse.

I guess that is what I take issue with, that statement makes it sounds like any use of a slur is always wrong regardless of context and that any reason for using it is just to wiggle out of you being a bad person.

Youre right that irony doesnt stopbit being a slur, but usage absolutely matters. Unless you think its inexcusable black people using the n word with each other? Context is incredibly important.

There’s no apparent way to disable the Microsoft 365 account manager in the Start menu, and there’s no option to deactivate the constant nagging to upgrade to a paid Microsoft 365 subscription.

Sounds like an ad to me.

But the vast majority of the time they are approved, and the nomination begins with politicians. Contrast this to the way the UK does it where the appointments come from the senior judges with politicians then approving or rejecting the proposed new member.

Thats a problem with political appointments by the president not life terms.

Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user’s public photos and posts

Where is the LLM that can reproduce specific whole copyrighted works on demand? All ive seen is reproductions of quotes of a few sentences (fair use) and hacks that can make it ocasionally vomit up random larger fragments of its training data, maybe up to a few paragraphs.

Yep, its definitely not possible that nice small businesses like universal and sony would sue without an actual case in order to try and crush competitors with costs.

The purpose of twitter like platforms is to have people to listen to and people to listen to you, so yes vastly lower user counts is a drawback.

Have you considered that maybe other people have different priorities, needs and desires to you, and that for people coming around to your point of view you should encourage them rather than castigate them for taking too long?

hmmm I wonder if that is considered in the thousands of words of this article…

It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon, but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing.

You seem very insistent on interpreting millenia of history through the lense of an early 20th century political movement.

Yes there has likely always been an element of theatre and leaders exagerating their role in battles, but to claim that nobility/monarchs never came from warrior castes that were active in fighting flies in the face of huge amounts of scholarship. It hasnt been true in industrialised societies since the 18th century at least but that doesnt mean it never was.

There are, the authors estimate, 150 Russian remote nuclear launch sites and 70 in China, approximately 2,500km (1,550 miles) from the nearest border, all of which could be reached by US air-launched JASSM and Tomahawk cruise missiles in a little more than two hours in an initial attack designed to prevent nuclear weapons being launched.

Emphasis mine, I’m pretty sure even Russia can notice hundreds of cruise missiles are heading directly at their silos and figure out that this looks like an attack on their strategic nuclear arsenal in two whole hours, given that ICBMs take around a quarter of that from launch to impact.

Ask your calculator what 1-(1-1e-99) is and see if it never halucinates (confidently gives an incorrect answer) still.

No, correctness is defined by usage. There is no high authority that lays down rules and you are wrong if you break them. 100 years ago you would have been considered incorrect if you asked “who am I speaking to?” rather than “To whom am I speaking?”. There wasnt a committee meeting some time in the 50s where it was decided to change the rules and depreciate cases in who/whom it just happened naturally and what is “correct” evolved.

Dictionaries themselves say that that they document how language is used rather than setting rules to follow, hence they now inculde a definition of literally as “not actually true but for emphasis”.

Further to this its not likely to result in less children being abused.

If you have the death penalty for even possessing CSAM as the parent suggests, then there is no incentive to not get into distribution or even actively abusing children and producing CSAM once you posess some. The punishment isnt any worse so why not? Its the same reason for proportionality in other crimes, we dont punish robbing a bank with life in jail as then there would be no reason for anyone who robs a bank to not just murder everyone to leave no witnessess.