This is my recollection as well. Microsoft was basically the savior back then, when Lotus was viewed as old and hard to maintain. It wasn't unusual hear from colleagues suffering a multi day Notes outage due to sync issues or the bridge being broken. "Hip" companies moved to Outlook and Exchange.
He's spent years telling his supporters not to vote by mail. So during the election when there are problems with the mail, those will primarily affect the other party. That's enough to steal an election without more steps.
Having bare minimum protections against invalid voters, illegal immigrants or otherwise, is a basic precaution that every country on Earth except America does. The honor system we have here is absurdly lenient. I understand the Democrat desire to oppose everything Trump proposes, but imagine if in The Netherlands you can waltz in and say you are this person or that person, without any ID check whatsoever. Europeans might not realize this but that is literally the American system.
I totally grant that the fraud Trump is claiming is way off the mark. But why not just... require ID to vote? At least in federal elections? The lack of verification is the exact reason why the lies continue
Voting systems in Europe differ by country, but for example here in Switzerland I just get my ballot in the mail, fill it in and send it back to get counted.
And of course Swiss Post just processes this as a regular piece of mail, routing it to the address written on the envelope, without any weird cross-tabulation against voter registers or barcodes…
Some years ago a postman in Spain was caught with a sack in his home with 3000 votes that never were delivered to their destiny. This happened many months after the election. Last year in December some thieves broke into a small village post office and stole the money and the sack with 124 mail votes that were found later partially burnt. The few voters involved were allowed to re-send his vote before the elections and an organization of 12 people were detained later for this an other assaults to post offices before the local elections.
So yes, mail voting has a few issues still, not a lot, but is not impossible to break. If every worker in the post office is from one party and nobody in that party votes by mail, bribing and corrupting the system is doable, and even easy; specially if your work depends on it.
If you do this in small populations or at scale you could easily remove enough votes from the system until winning the place by one single vote. If you are malignant enough you could even blame later millions of "lazy" people for not voting and laugh about it.
Mail voting depends on trusting what your postman is not a plant.
> imagine if in The Netherlands you can waltz in and say you are this person or that person
That's not at all how it works. Typically, you do need to present ID to register. You also need to verify your address on the day of voting. If someone does commit fraud, it's easy to detect: as soon as the real voter tries to vote, the system will detect a "double vote." The fact that this almost never happens suggests that there is not much fraud, if any. And the amount of fraud required to actually change an election result with this method would require a concerted effort of tens of thousands of people, all risking federal prosecution.
> that is literally the American system.
No. Please stop misrepresenting the facts.
> But why not just... require ID to vote?
There are lots of good reasons, which you are probably already aware of, including the fact that many people eligible to vote do not have the requisite ID and are unlikely to get it. My litmus test for supporting voter ID is that it is accompanied by (a) free, mandatory, and automatic national ID cards, and (b) national holiday on election days. Republicans won't support part A for their own ideological reasons, and moreover their purported effort to support voter integrity is not sincere: the goal is simply to prevent undesirable (i.e. non-Republican) voters from voting.
Canadian here, so take with a grain of salt. Both Canada and the US don't have a national ID system, at all (short of a passport). A state/province issued driver's license is the default form of ID. If you don't have a driver's license it is very possible you don't have an ID.
Most (if not all?) states and provinces will have some form of "non driving" ID available if needed. However, it is optional, costs money and requires other documentation to get it, such as an original copy of a birth certificate.
It's not that uncommon for an adult to not have an official ID. Either they never had one or have lost theirs and they haven't bothered/can't afford to get a new one.
The argument is that Republicans are exploiting the fact that this will disproportionately affect Democratic voters. Would some Republican voters be turned away? Of course. Would more Democratic voters be turned away than Republicans? Very very likely, and that's the point. It's a net win for one party to enforce voting ID laws while also not supporting some sort of free/cheap universal identity system.
>Most (if not all?) states and provinces will have some form of "non driving" ID available if needed. However, it is optional, costs money and requires other documentation to get it, such as an original copy of a birth certificate.
False. Every state in the US has a free voter ID option.
Even if there is no financial cost, it requires documentation and time to get voter ID. It is not issued automatically. That's why 10% of the US population doesn't have form of ID that could be used to vote and will be disenfranchised under Republican voter ID requirements. Until that issue is fixed, voter ID is not something I can support.
>and will be disenfranchised under Republican voter ID requirements.
Can you explain this further?
A person who can legally vote today, but in the future cannot vote because of election restrictions, will be disenfranchised. You are supporting election restrictions that disenfranchise 10% of the US population.
>>That's why 10% of the US population doesn't have form of ID that could be used to vote
>Correlation != causation
I never made a claim of causation. I just said that 10% of legal US voting-eligible citizens don't have ID and will therefore be disenfranchised by your proposal.
> They are issued automatically after proving eligibility.
> It’s not that uncommon for an adult to not have an ID
It’s extremely uncommon.
You need an ID to buy beer, open a bank account, prove you are eligible for employment, pick up a prescription at the pharmacy, book a hotel room, the list is very long. You cannot function in society without some form of ID.
The idea that a large number of Americans are being disenfranchised because they don’t have ID is farcical.
34 million people [1] or about 10 percent of the US population lack a form of ID that would be required under a voter ID law.
The fact that you assert otherwise, without evide, shows that you live in a privilege bubble. None of your friends lack an ID, so you conclude it's rare.
Many who were born before segregation ended in the mid-1960s were not granted birth certificates, as their mothers were forced to use midwives during birth because local hospitals were whites only and turned them away.
The comparison to western European countries doesn't hold up. Speaking from Norway: yes, it's true you have to provide ID to vote, both in national and local elections. The difference is that obtaining ID is trivial, to the point where essentially everyone here legally has ID. I wouldn't be surprised if the most common way for someone not to have ID would literally be "all of it was in my luggage and the airline lost it", or some similar very temporary state. In the US, the people who do have ID do not even form a representative sample of the population as far as I understand
I can't speak for the Americans, but I would imagine there'd be far less liberal pushback against voter ID if everyone could trivially obtain it.
How's this for a compromise: republicans get voter ID laws, in return for a national, bipartisanly monitored program to ensure that anyone who wants it can trivially obtain ID. Once that's realized, the voter ID laws can kick in?
> In Europe, you can't get a regular ID without being a citizen. So having an ID automatically means you're eligible to vote.
Nitpick: E.g. Norwegian ID cards can be had by any legal resident. The card will say that you're not a citizen though, so your point about that stands.
Re driving license: Driving license is a valid form of ID for voting here. All eligible people are on the voting rolls automatically (unlike the absurd american system), and the driving license is merely used to prove you are who you say you are.
This is not true. For example not every citizen can vote (people under guardianship or criminals) and not citizens can vote in local elections in the EU, if they came from another EU country.
The point I tried to make is that with the system we have here it's much less of a hassle to prove you're eligible to vote. The system wants you to be able to vote, and to be able to do that easily.
Yes, but a driver's license can be accepted as ID.
Just because a driver's license isn't proof of citizenship doesn't mean that it isn't sufficient, since it will have some identifier connected to the identity of the voter. You would show the driver's license, then the registrars would find your name on the list, strike it out, give your voting envelopes, and then you go wait for a private booth to become free and then you go into that booth and put your votes in those voting envelopes.
A Swedish driver's license doesn't mean Swedish citizenship. It can still be used to check somebody's identity. Citizenship is checked by seeing whether the person is on the voter rolls, not by their identity card.
Some of the Republican proposals would require a proof of citizenship at registration time. You would still be able to register without a passport but you need to take your birth or naturalization certificate. Not everyone has them at home so you might need to go to your parents place in another state or risk getting it mailed. Good luck.
The point is not making registration impossible, just harder and more complicated. When you combine it with voter roll purges the play is clear.
Get a biased commission to remove everyone named Jackson or Hernandez a couple months before the election because "there's too many people with that last name and officials might confuse them" or purge a whole district that just happens to be an opposing party stronghold based on a single voter fraud conviction.Do it silently without informing voters, and when they realize they need to register again they have to go through a complicated process designed to make them give up.
Rejecting IDs at the poll booth is actually pretty rare because it's so obvious. Real schemes are a bit more creative.
> Yes, but a driver's license can be accepted as ID
So what would that accomplish? The Trump playbook asserts that there is a massive conspiracy involving noncitizen voting. Their proposals involve proving citizenship to vote. And now your argument is to use ID that doesn't prove citizenship. Brilliant.
Actually you need a REAL ID to board a plane now. 20% of americans don't have them. They're pointless, take a lot of time and effort to aquire and are needlessly expensive.
> Actually you need a REAL ID to board a plane now.
If you don't have a REAL ID or passport, you can just pay a $50 fee and get on the plane anyway. So whatever the REAL ID proves cannot be essential to security.
In much of Europe you don't need ID for those, except a driving license, which happens to be an ID but primarily exists to prove you are qualified to drive. If you look young you are asked to prove your age if buying cigarettes or alcohol but the requirements for that are relatively low.
Until recently in the UK you did not need any ID to vote, that was introduced recently as an echo to the US stolen election conspiracy, as demagogues love to steal ideas from each other.
> imagine if in The Netherlands you can waltz in and say you are this person or that person, without any ID check whatsoever. Europeans might not realize this but that is literally the American system
This is of course not true, why say clearly incorrect things?
First, there is no "American system" as such, because every state is responsible for running elections, so there are 50 state systems in the US.
More importantly, I get my ballot in the mail only because I'm registered to vote at the DMV, you know the same agency that issues the very ID they check to make sure I'm elegible to vote.
You don't just "waltz in" to the post office or whever to get a ballot.
The GOP and Trump supporters have so far spent millions of dollars trying to prove voter fraud. Mike Lindell of my pillow has lost his fortune trying to prove it.
They didn't prove any of their claims, and several even went to prison for contempt because they refused to substantiate their claims in front of a judge.
HN rules says to be kind and not call names, but you are either willfully ignorant or a liar, and in both cases you are complicit in a soft coup attempt.
Yeah.. no, thanks. I make coffee and sit by the pool for that, or bike around town before the heat sets in. I commuted for 20 years and, sure, I had lots of time to think, but it also destroyed my back and health.
That's worse though. Cutting a program that had been successful for decades is short sighted, but people tend to begin focusing on the cost of prevention after so long. Memories fade and the question starts to become, "Why are we still spending so much?"
That's not what happened. DOGE carelessly cut a program in the middle of fighting a crisis.
Unfortunately, even if you upgrade there are still upgrade prompts for an even higher version of Workspace and gemini.
Recently screen sharing a document I noticed a new "omg please use gemini" button they placed OVER THE DOCUMENT itself. That's in addition to the magic star thing in the right and the gemini menu item. If you're using Chrome there are the browser ai buttons, too.
Plenty are whining now and that doesn't seem to bother them. I mean, this is one of the largest companies in the world. This is the company that once told people they were holding the phone wrong. I can't see them being particularly more bothered by people complaining in a slightly different way.
As used by commercial hardware and software vendors, "support" can mean anything from "we'll come fix it for you when it breaks, or your money back" to merely "theoretically, it should work, and we won't get in the way of you trying". Likewise, "unsupported" can mean anything from "don't complain to us if it doesn't work" to "we're going to spend significant engineering effort to prevent it from working".
A stance of "here's some hardware documentation, implement the drivers yourself" definitely falls within that spectrum of "support", and is the kind of "support" for Linux that some hardware vendors have in the past been lauded for, eg. when AMD started documenting their GPUs.
That level of "support" from Apple for running Linux bare-metal on Apple Silicon would be an improvement from the status quo, and in practice would probably be sufficient to get good drivers written and upstreamed in short order, given how much interest there is in running Linux on these devices.
We're talking about "people walking into Genius Bar expecting help with Linux" support. It's not philosophical discussion on what support is, there's literally a specific thing discussed here.
That's one of the several forms of support under discussion, under the specious claim that it would become the expected level of support as soon as Apple declared any level of support for Linux. But as the comments you're refusing to understand have explained, Apple could meaningfully "support" Linux in the form of providing hardware documentation, without making any promises to help any customers troubleshoot Linux running on that hardware.
KDE 6.6 is great to me, but there are some quirks I have found. Their "peek at desktop" feature is annoying, I want "minimize all" but you have to do some scripting to enable that.
I've noticed that clicking the network button to see wifi status shows traffic rate, and that seems to lag and I suspect it has an impact on throughput.
I'm interested in Cosmic when it matures some more.
Have you read the article? There's real frustration with Windows. It's so bad that my 15 year old, who only really uses his computer to launch Steam, asked me to help him install Linux. He had heard about Bazzite and already knew his gpu would be compatible. He gets about 20 fps more on Linux and can choose when updates are applied. There's no forced online login, ads in the OS or copilot prompts. His browser doesn't revert to Edge.
He doesn't really want to care but Microsoft's decisions have made their main product into an annoyance.
Some people, myself included, are already less frustrated with Linux. Which means it is likely that other people would be less frustrated if they tried Linux. Not 100% of them, of course, but some for sure.
This is great. Also, as somebody going through this change for the second time, I'll add that things come in waves. Sometimes grief, sometimes loneliness, sometimes regret, etc. It'll swell and seem to last for forever, but then it'll pass almost without noticing. When you're in the worst of it remember it will ease up eventually.
Whenever I feel down I try to redirect those thoughts into some new thing that I can do now. Nothing is ever 100% negative. Find those positives, dig them up and display them.
I get through by getting into every single thing I couldn't do before. Just like when I turned 18, I went to every place I could find to get carded. Even a great relationship is work and compromises are made, and it's hard to find the time to do all the things.
This weekend I dug out my trip collection I wasn't allowed to display. I pulled out old photos and hangers that didn't make sense for our blended family but now it's just what I want. I bought some used golf clubs. I rearranged the whole house to suit me (and to fill in the empty parts).
I'd bet your dog never seen either the snow or the beach, so take a whole trip just to do it. Learn to play drums. Spend hours at a bookstore. During a bad breakup some years ago, I volunteered for a campaign and went knocking on doors. Not only did I not get shot but I made some friends, too.
Revel in this phase. Because this will also pass and you'll find something else eventually (if you want to). I'm trying to be the most single I can be to really appreciate this time and learn from it.
You know, looking back at my life so far I realize.. all of my best stories were from my single days.
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