In general integer division is implemented using a form of long division, in binary. There is no base-10 arithmetic involved. It’s a relatively expensive operation which usually requires multiple clock cycles to complete, whereas dividing by a power of two (“bit shifting”) is trivial and can be done in hardware simply by routing the signals appropriately, without any logic gates.

The metric standard is to measure information in bits.

Bytes are a non-metric unit. Not a power-of-ten multiple of the metric base unit for information, the bit.

If you’re writing “1 million bytes” and not “8 million bits” then you’re not using metric.

If you aren’t using metric then the metric prefix definitions don’t apply.

There is plenty of precedent for the prefixes used in metric to refer to something other than an exact power of 1000 when not combined with a metric base unit. A microcomputer is not one one-thousandth of a computer. One thousand microscopes do not add up to one scope. Megastructures are not exactly one million times the size of ordinary structures. Etc.

Finally: This isn’t primarily about bit shifting, it’s about computers being based on binary representation and the fact that memory addresses are stored and communicated using whole numbers of bits, which naturally leads to memory sizes (for entire memory devices or smaller structures) which are powers of two. Though the fact that no one is going to do something as idiotic as introducing an expensive and completely unnecessary division by a power of ten for every memory access just so you can have 1000-byte MMU pages rather than 4096 also plays a part.

That part is messed up. You shouldn’t be dealing with individual contractors as a patient. All billing should go through the hospital, and be considered in-network provided the hospital is in-network, regardless of what kind of specialist sees you there. Any exception, such as bringing in someone who doesn’t normally work there to treat a rare condition, should require separate and specific authorization from the patient in advance.

When you have an actual functioning competitive market the money you bring in correlates with the value of the service you provide, so it makes perfect sense to be happy about the money the new surgical center is bringing in. That means it’s useful.

The problem is that the health care market is regulated and subsidized in so many ways, many of them conflicting with each other, that competition is very limited and price discovery is reduced to “whatever the patient (and their insurance) can afford to pay” since they can’t go anywhere else. Fix that and there won’t be any reason for hospital owners or employees to feel guilty about making money.

If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.

A smarter system won’t just take the mean of the votes from different instances but rather discard outliers as invalid input (flagging repeat offenders to be ignored in the future) and use the median or mode of the remainder. The results should also be quantitized to avoid leaking details about sources or internal algorithms; only the larger trends need to be reported.

Of course you could always just keep the collected data private and only provide it to customers willing to pay $$$ for access, which handily limits instance operators’ ability to reverse-engineer the source of the data. And nothing prevents you from using separate instances for public and private data sets.

Open primaries invite strategic voters to sabotage the party they want to lose rather than supporting the candidate they want to win.

Of course you can still do that with closed primaries—you just have to register as the party you want to vote for in the primaries, ignoring your own preferences. Nothing forces you to vote for your registered party in the general election. It’s slightly more involved this way since you would need to change your registration more frequently, and commit to it earlier, but that isn’t much of a hurdle.

Personally, I’d love it if Democrats became the right-most party by staying exactly as they are, and a new party breaks off of them or evolves out to their left.

I’d say it’s more likely to go the other way, with the more moderate or right-leaning Democrats breaking off to form their own party and perhaps steal away the more moderate Republican voters. There are a lot of voters who would naturally align more closely with traditional Republican political views voting Democrat only because the Republican party has been taken over by a radical faction. Having laissez-faire fiscal conservatives and outright socialists in the same party isn’t really sustainable long-term; there are too many critical points of disagreement.

It is just as ridiculous that Republicans in California have little say in the presidency as Democrats in Wyoming.

The Republicans in California have a better chance of seeing a Republican president with the electoral college than they would with a national popular vote, even if their particular votes carry less weight. In a sense that gives them more representation in the end, not less—their voices are ignored but they get what they wanted anyway.

Bingo. They could do it themselves, but they want to spend other people’s money, not just their own. Same as any other tax. Bonus PR points for appearing “generous”.

The mother had a claim because the house was literally given to her, which was the right of it’s previous owner.

This person has no claim.

If the previous owners wanted it to remain with the family line they should have formalized that by placing the house in a trust.

These are protesters, not terrorists. A reputable news agency isn’t going to take sides one way or the other. The reporting should be structured more like a debate, with both sides allowed to voice their positions in neutral language and offer a rebuttal.

If you can easily tell which side of the issue the presenter is on you’re seeing an opinion piece, not news.

Nothing says that the owner/buyer of a car has to be the one who drives it. You could buy a car and have someone else drive you around. Or just buy one for someone else to use—for example a parent who doesn't drive could buy a car for their child who has a license. Or vice-versa. Either way there is no reason for the buyer to need a license.

They ruled that people acting together have all the same rights that they would have acting individually, and that preventing someone from spending money on producing and promoting their speech effectively prevents them from being heard. Which are both perfectly true, common-sense statements.

Except it's not even that indirect. The government of Texas invented this novel class of private liability, and their courts are the ones enforcing it. That's the same as banning it themselves, and blatantly unconstitutional.

I'm a bit surprised they didn't implement this as a tax. That would be just as bad, but the federal government has a long history of imposing punitive taxes on things they aren't allowed to ban; it would have been harder to fight it that way without forcing an overhaul of the entire tax system… and politicians are so very fond of special-purpose taxes and credits.

If you can read emails sent to a given address, and send replies from that address, it basically is your email address for all practical purposes no matter who was meant to be using the account. This is not necessarily a good thing and better end-to-end security would be nice but it is what it is. Odds are the app itself would let anyone change the password and log in provided they can read the emails, unless it's using some form of 2FA.

So you're not remapping the source ports to be unique? There's no mechanism to avoid collisions when multiple clients use the same source port? Full Cone NAT implies that you have to remember the mapping (potentially indefinitely—if you ever reassign a given external IP:port combination to a different internal IP or port after it's been used you're not implementing Full Cone NAT), but not that the internal and external ports need to be identical. It would generally only be used when you have a large enough pool of external IP addresses available to assign a unique external IP:port for every internal IP:port. Which usually implies a unique external IP for each internal IP, as you can't restrict the number of unique ports used by each client. This is why most routers only implement Symmetric NAT.

(If you do have sufficient external IPs the Linux kernel can do Full Cone NAT by translating only the IP addresses and not the ports, via SNAT/DNAT prefix mapping. The part it lacks, for very practical reasons, is support for attempting to create permanent unique mappings from a larger number of unconstrained internal IP:port combinations to a smaller number of external ones.)

They should still be using the CPU's built-in AES hardware acceleration, yes? It seems they have good reason not to trust the SSD to handle the encryption but that doesn't mean it has to be entirely implemented in software. CPU-accelerated AES shouldn't be that much slower.

Examples of local commands I might run in tmux could include anything long-running which is started from the command line. A virtual machine (qemu), perhaps, or a video encode (ffmpeg). Then if I need to log out or restart my GUI session for any reason—or something goes wrong with the session manager—it won't take the long-running process with it. While the same could be done with nohup or systemd-run, using tmux allows me to interact with the process after it's started.

I also have systems which are accessed both locally and remotely, so sometimes (not often) I'll start a program on a local terminal through tmux so I can later interact with it through SSH without resorting to x11vnc.

Not the GP but I also use tmux (or screen in a pinch) for almost any SSH session, if only as insurance against dropped connections. I occasionally use it for local terminals if there is a chance I might want a command to outlive the current graphical session or migrate to SSH later.

Occasionally it's nice to be able to control the session from the command line, e.g. splitting a window from a script. I've also noticed that wrapping a program in tmux can avoid slowdowns when a command generates a lot of output, depending on the terminal emulator. Some emulators will try to render every update even if it means blocking the output from the program for the GUI to catch up, rather than just updating the state of the terminal in memory and rendering the latest version.

Allegories aside, the Bible definitely has a few LGBTQ characters, even if they're not portrayed in a very positive light. I suppose that means they'll be banning the Bible from school libraries? Not to mention a fair amount of historical literature… including anything featuring Leonardo da Vinci, Florence Nightingale, King James (yes, that King James), William Shakespeare, King Richard I, or Julius Caesar.

It will be interesting to see whether this makes the history classes easier, for lack of material to cover, or harder, for lack of references.