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Its not against the law in any US state (a quick search seems to back this up) to pass on the right. With one huge gotcha, it must be "safe" defined in various ways.

OTOH, most states have a stay right except to pass, slower traffic keep right laws.

Which means, that unless the person to your right is weaving through traffic, driving on the shoulder, or a few other bits of unsafe behavior, if someone passes you on the right your likely the one violating the law by not moving right when your not actively overtaking/passing someone.


In Austin too, and probably just caused a driver to think the same thing. They were in the left lane on a frontage road which was suddenly turning left even though there was an entire lane opposite the intersection blocked off by those plastic things that seem popular to randomly place in the road these days. I saw them hesitate and figured they wanted to merge right, so i decelerated a bit to add another car length or or so, at maybe 10-15mph. They had plenty of space, flipped on their blinker, and instead of just merging started slowing down, to which I decided I wasn't going to brake more to allow them to block myself and everyone else from rolling through the intersection. They basically stopped in their lane, and beeped as I rolled by, to which someone behind them beeped at them for blocking the lane.

In Austin if you want to merge, decide if you can, blink and then merge.

Don't expect people to stomp on their brakes and stop to let you in, especially if your already traveling slower than the lane you are trying to get into and decide to further slow yourself.

And if you can't merge, deal with it, exit, or miss your exit and go around. Next time you will be more prepared or you will learn how to properly merge.


Why? If everyone followed the rules the lanes would segment into slowest on the right, with gradually increasing speed to the left and people moving between the lanes as needed to overtake. It would be far far far better than the chaos of having to move across all the lanes of traffic all the time because there are random campers driving below the speed limit in every single lane.

First, everyone switches right as soon as there's a gap in a righter lane, so lots of unnecessary switching. Second, the right lane is always full making it hard to merge on or off the highway. Third, the leftmost lanes are underutilized when they could be filled with people who have a long way to go until their offramp.

There are whole catagories of people without "ID" as such, like say underage children or people unable to drive. ID's in the USA have traditionally been either drivers licenses or passports. Many states have added non-drivers license IDs for handicapped, elderly, etc, but AFAIK they aren't particularly popular since those catagories of people don't tend to need them until they suddenly find themselves in a situation needing one.

But the airlines don't really give a crap, southwest started basically as an air bus, show up buy a ticket get on. No reservation, no id, nothing.

The airlines don't even check ID most of the time with these electronic boarding passes if your not checking luggage.


If you are flying domestically, the airline doesn’t care. They know that someone bought a ticket to get pass security and that ticket matched the ID of the person who got through security. They don’t lose money and thier is no increased safety risk.

They do check your ID for international flights


Frankly, the entire agency is unconstitutional. From the fact that they basically exist under a general warrant issued by the supreme court (although they invented a new catagory, "administrative search", which doesn't fundamentally change what it is) to the restrictions on the right to assembly requires free travel as well, although the current legal underpinnings are "creative", the 10th admendment which grants all non enumerated powers to the states, to the restrictions on bearing arms on the plane and a half dozen other parts. About the only part they might be able to stand on is commerce again, but then so much travel in the larger states remains in the state (ex dallas/houston, san fran/LA) requiring seperate security zones.

Bush should have _NEVER_ nationalized them, at least as a private entity they existed in a sorta gray area. Now they are clearly violating the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 10th amendments.

And the solution isn't another bullshit supreme court amendment of the absolutist language in the bill of rights/etc but to actually have a national discussion about how much safety the are providing vs their cost, intrusiveness, etc and actually find enough common ground to amend the constitution. Until then they are unconstitutional and the court makes a mockery of itself and delgitimizes then entire apparatus in any ruling that doesn't tear it down as such.

And before anyone says "oh thats hard", i'm going to argue no its not, pretty much 100% of the country could agree to amend the 2nd to ban the private ownership of nuclear weapons, there isn't any reason that it shouldn't be possible to get 70% support behind some simple restrictions "aka no guns, detected via a metal detector on public airplanes" passed. But then the agency wouldn't be given free run to do whatever the political appointee of the week feels like. But there are "powers" that are more interested in tracking you, selling worthless scanners, and creating jobs programs for people who enjoy feeling people up and picking through their dirty underwear.


Inventing categories is what the court does. The Constitution is incredibly brief, and gives zero guidance on how to clarify conflicts. It has always been full of "common sense" exceptions, like criminalizing threats (despite the unqualified "freedom of speech" language) or probable cause (police can invade your house if they know you are committing a crime right now).

The sum total of these "common sense" exceptions, and the "legal reasoning" that extends them to the modern world, means that the document itself doesn't actually mean anything. Your rights, such as they are, consist of literally millions of pages of decisions, plus the oral tradition passed down in law schools.


The constitution doesn't provide a "common sense" loophole. Much of it is written in absolutist language because that was the actual intention. The amendment process is provided to open "common sense" loopholes if everyone agrees they are common sense, not for the courts to gradually erode the language until the federal goverment is doing things the founders explicitly fought the revolutionary war over.

Put another way, Writs of Assistance, were perfectly legal common sense way for the British government to assure their customs laws were being enforced, and it was one of the more significant drivers of the revolution.


The passage of the alien and sedition acts without constitutional amendment disproves that idea.

At first glance that seems to be true, but when you look at the arguments at the time, who made them and how much of it was walked back, it just looks like the usual legislative panic, same as 911. It doesn't make the original intentions wrong, anymore than what happens when you release open source software and it takes on a life of its own under new maintainers. The failure to understand the long term reprocusion of basically ignoring the actual language of the original document puts one in a place where literally nothing matters except what you can ram through congress and get supreme court approval over during a time of panic or before the other side takes over again.

Thats not a constitutional democracy, thats just anarchy and rule by whoever can buy the most seats.


I wouldn't really call 100Gbit overkill, if you compare it to modern disk drives is about where we should be relative to shared storage/NAS/etc infrastructure people used to run. So yes, being able to share my /home directory across a few dozen machines at my house without a huge perf impact vs using a local drive seems a pretty reasonable use case. Sure its faster than my WAN access, but who cares?

Frankly, 10Gbit is fully 25 years old with, 10GbaseT being 20 years old this year.

Thats ridiculously ancient technology. There is/was a 25/40GbaseT spec too (now 10 years old), which basically no one implemented because like ECC ram (and tape drives, and seem to be trying to do it with harddrives and GPUs) the MBA's have taken over parts of the computer industry and decided that they can milk huge profit margins from technologies which are incrementally more difficult because smaller users just don't matter to their bottom lines. The only reason those MBAs are allowing us to have it now, is because a pretty decent percentage of us can now get 5Gbit+ internet access and our wifi routers can do 1Gbit+ wireless, and the weak link is being able to attach the two.

I did a bit of back of the napkin math/simulation about a possible variable rate Ethernet (ex like NBbaseT, where it has multiple speeds and selects faster one based on line conditions), and concluded that 80+Gbit using modern PHY/DSP's and high symbol rate, multiple bands, techology which is dirt cheap thanks to wifi/bt/etc on fairly short cable distances (ex 30-50M) on CAT8 is entirely possible. And this isn't even fantasy, short cat7 runs are an entire diffrent ballpark from a phone pair, and these days mg.fast/etc have shown 10Gbit+ over that junk.


Agreed - the big thing is 100g is much much cheaper now as so much 100g gear is coming out of datacenters. So many of those older ConnectX4s and 5s, plus lots of switches and optics. 100g really is the new 10g for homelabs.

<i>So with the 80386, Intel finally abandoned their failed approach of segmented address spaces and joined the linear rest of the world. (Of course the 386 is technically still segmented, but let's ignore that).</i>

That seems an odd interpretation of how they extended the 286 protected mode on the 386. The 286 converted the fixed address+64k sized segment registers to 'selectors' in the LDT/GDT which added permissions/etc to a segment descriptor structure which were transparently cached along with the 'base' of the segment in generally invisible portions of the register. The problem with this approach was the same as CHERI/etc that it requires a fat pointer comprising the segment+offset which to this day remains problematic with standard C where certain classes of programmers expect that sizeof (void*) == sizeof (int or long).

Along comes the 386 with adds a further size field (limit) to the segment descriptor which can be either bytes or pages.

And of course it added the ability to back linear addresses with paging, if enabled.

Its entirely possible to run the 386 in an object=segment only mode where each data structure exists in its own segment descriptor and the hardware enforces range checking, and heap compression/etc can happen automatically by simply copying the segment to another linear address and adjusting the base address. By today standards the number of outstanding segment descriptors is limiting, but remember 1985 when a megabyte of RAM was a pretty reasonable amount...

The idea that someone would create a couple descriptors with base=0:limit=4G and set all the segment register to them, in order to assure that int=void * is sorta a known possible misuse of the core architecture. Of course this basically requires paging as the processor then needs to deal with the fact that it likely doesn't actually have 4G of ram, and the permissions model then is enforced at a 4K granularity. Leaving open all the issues C has with buffer overflows, and code + data permissions mixing/etc. Its not a better model, just one easier to reason about initially, but then for actual robust software starts to fall apart for long running processes due to address space fragmentation and a lot of other related problems.

AKA, it wasn't necessarily the best choice, and we have been dealing with the repercussion of lazy OS/systems programmers for the 40 years since.

PS: intel got(gets) a lot of hate from people wanting to rewrite history, by ignoring the release date of many of these architectural advancements. Ex the entire segment register 'fiasco' is a far better solution than the banked memory systems available in most other 8/16 bit machines. The 68000 is fully a year later in time, and makes no real attempt at being backwards compatible with the 6800 unlike the 8086 which is clearly intended to be a replacement for the 8080.


You did see that bit you quoted?

> (Of course the 386 is technically still segmented, but let's ignore that)

Yes, the 80386 was still technically segmented, but the overwhelming majority of operating systems (95%+) effectively abandoned segmentation for memory protection and organization, except for very broad categories such as kernel vs. user space.

Instead, they configured the 80386 registers to provide a large linear address space for user processes (and usually for the kernel as well).

> The idea that someone would create a couple descriptors with base=0:limit=4G and set all the segment register to them, in order to assure that int=void * is sorta a known possible misuse of the core architecture

The thing that you mischaracterize as a "misuse" of the architecture wasn't just some corner case that was remotely "possible", it was what 95% of the industry did.

The 8086 wasn't so much a design as a stopgap hail-mary pass following the fiasco of the iAPX 432. And the VAX existed long before the 8086.


I think my point revolves more around what the HW designers were enabling. If they thought that the flat model was the right one, they would have just kept doing what the 286 did, and fixed the segment sizes at 4G.


Yes. The point is that the hardware designers were wrong in thinking that the segmented model was the right one.

The hardware designers kept enabling complex segmented models using complex segment machinery. Operating system designers fixed the segments as soon as the hardware made that possible in order to enable a flat (paged) memory model and never looked back.


But were the software people actually right, or did they just follow the well-trodden path of VMS / UNIX, instead of making full use of the x86 hardware?

Having separate segments for every object is problematic because of pointer size and limited number of selectors, but even 3 segments for code/data/stack would have eliminated many security bugs, especially at the time when there was no page-level NX bit. For single-threaded programs, the data and stack segment could have shared the same address space but with a different limit (and the "expand-down" bit set), so that 32-bit pointers could reach both using DS, while preventing [SS:EBP+x] from accessing anything outside the stack.


Inasmuch as hardware exists to run software, so software is the customer, the hardware people were wrong by definition, as they created a product that their customers weren't asking for, didn't want and had no use for.

Might segmentation have been better if the software had wanted it? Well, it's a counterfactual, so in some sense we can't know. And we can argue why we believe one or the other is better, but the evidence seems to be pretty overwhelming. It's not that there weren't (and aren't) operating systems that use segmentation, but somehow their "better" memory model didn't take the world by storm.


https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.ht...

Is the security extension from 1996, which has a section on keyboard security

and its crazy to me that this anyone can claim X11 can't be off loaded, which its been doing for decades. From all the crazy blt/pattern HW acceleration to GL/vulcan implementations to the fact that the entire server can be on the other side of a network pipe, meaning it could be anywhere, including entirely encapsulated on a graphics card/smart nic/etc.

And if your talking about the xlib serialization, that was largely fixed with XCB.


https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.ht...

Notice the date.. 1996

(for those that didn't click the link, that is the X11 security extension which address all that, and it was published ~30 years ago).


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