‘Low stakes’ as in ‘the new mayor isn’t sending everyone who didn’t vote for their party to jail’.

If code was impossible to make safe banks would still be doing manual labour and ATMs would’ve been phased out.

Financial transactions are logged and the logs maintained for a certain number of years. You can definitely use a similar system for voting when the stakes are low - local elections, for example. But an electronic voting system cannot be both secret and verifiable. In practice you make finding out how someone voted as hard as possible, and hope that a future government will not put in the effort to crack your system. All of which is completely unnecessary when paper ballots exist, and can be both secret and verifiable.

Improve the quality of life of the people. How this can be done would vary from country to country and age to age, but this should be the overarching aim.

Burgerland is slang for the USA.

Write down a list of the software you use (e.g. web browser, office suite, notepad, image viewer, video player, … ). Download Linux Mint from here and use Balena Etcher to write it into a pen drive. Switch off your computer, plug in the pen drive and switch on. DON’T INSTALL YET. Run Linux ‘live’ for a couple of hours, see if everything (speaker, printer, webcam, all the software you listed above) is working correctly.

Once you have confirmed that all is well, copy your files into an external hard drive, confirm that everything important has been backed up, and then install Linux from the pen drive. (You can have both Windows and Linux on the same computer, but then Windows should not be given internet access or it will ‘update’ and mess up everything. This can be repaired using, for example, this software, but why bother?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKQlQlQ6_pk&t=127

But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.

For the reasons you described, I won’t run VLC as root, and I don’t think 99% of users would need to. But if someone wanted to do it, the software shouldn’t stop them from doing it (beyond giving a warning and asking them to confirm).

They compete for oil buyers. And Russia is close to Iran. Pretty sure Saudi is acting out of self-interest here.

Any distro that can run Chromium / Chrome. And everything other than Teams will work even on Firefox.

any religious person could simply explain evolution away as the mechanism by which a god or gods created humanity

Many did, and this position is called Deism. In most versions, god(s) started the universe with initial conditions that would lead to the formation of intelligent life, and then withdrew.

1796. Anyway, the cowpox vaccine was an improvement on smallpox variolation, which was known to the Chinese at least by 1549.

What is the reason we don’t run as root?

We are human and make mistakes. Not running as root means the computer will ask us to confirm when we are about to do something major (like a software update, or formatting a partition). This reduces the chance of making big mistakes. (But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.)

Bold of you to assume voters care about consistency or policies. For many Tory upporters in the Home Counties, southeast, southwest and east London, voting Labour would be a bridge too far. But the Lib Dems might be an acceptable alternative. There’s a reason the main left of centre party in these regions is the Lib Dems, and not Labour.

The Liberal Democrats are talking a lot about the blue wall.

These are traditional Conservative seats where they hope Tory voters have had enough of the present government, can’t bring themselves to vote Labour - and see the Lib Dems as an acceptable alternative.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c888523y90mo

That’s a great wish list, but I’m not sure how many of those will happen. Increased NHS funding is sadly unlikely given your economy and xenophobia against immigrants. I’m hoping you get increased support for green energy, free school meals and rail nationalisation, and at least a modest raise in the minimum wage. Cheap, clean energy, educated and healthy children, and an affordable and reliable transport system can do so much for the economy.

as that’s where they would go if LibDems disappeared.

Many of them, yes. But there’s also a significant share who’ll vote Lib Dem or Tory, but not Labour.

as that’s where they would go if LibDems disappeared.

Many of them, yes. But there’s also a significant share who’ll vote Lib Dem or Tory, but not Labour.

It’s a stupid system, but I don’t expect the party that got 412 seats on a 34% voteshare to reform it.

Labour lost four seats to independents running against its inaction on Gaza.

To the left of the current Labour leadership, yes.