https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme... goes into a lot more detail on many more of the munitions and the supply and manufacturing chains.

Where does clean data come from, and how do you know it is untainted? I can't think of any source of novel information that might not have been smoothed by LLM tools. In cases like 'the news', it is impossible as what is being reported may well be smoothed content like press releases and public statements. It seems kind of inevitable, where the more popular the tools are, the less untainted information gets produced, and the harder it is to find it.

Fewer and fewer countries. I think none of the countries I've been too where I've purchased a SIM without ID allow that anymore. It is required to try to limit purchase by scam call centers and to enable phone number portability.

Most people are also using keyboards less, spending more time waggling their mouse or having a break watching youtube. And people who are mostly employed to type, doing data entry or similar, have problems and physical therapists who understand the problems.

Carpel tunnel and RSI also predates computers. Musicians still suffer this sort of injury, generally by forcing themselves to keep playing when it hurts. Poor computer ergonomics just made it popular.

The pilot is for people unable to get to a polling booth. Traditionally, we use postal votes for this. But postal votes enable voter fraud (primarily selling your vote), so we can only use it for a small portion of votes or results become too suspect.

So paper systems require ballot boxes and polling stations for the vast majority, which makes elections expensive, complicated, and generally problematic. And unpopular, with low turnout, particularly during flu season and pandemic.

Switzerland is fully postal voting and has been for ages; it's fine and there is no social distrust despite the theoretical risk of vote selling.

This is an eVoting system - not at a ballot box. There is no printer. And even if there was, a similar problem can occur if you lose the keys. And you need keys because the printout cannot be voter verifiable, or you enable the various forms of vote fraud that anonymous ballot boxes were introduced to stop.

Sentience as defined in the paper is a really low bar. Personhood probably requires consciousness, if we could define and test for that.

Good on them for defining what they mean by 'sentience'. I think it is the definition where my thermostat exhibits sentience.

Seems very similar to turning on compiler warnings. A load of scary nothings, and a few bugs. But you fix the bugs and clarify the false positives, and end up with more robust and maintainable code.