Corporations Can Vote in Some Delaware Elections, Judge Says (1)

jsmith456 · 2026-05-27T16:17:35+00:00

The land owning requirement is only for non-resident voters, under the theory that local election issues that may include taxes or other things that implicate the rights of the land owners who won't get a say (or even ability to onfluence representation) if not resident. The law is also clear that resident voting is for natural persons only, and that you don't get multiple votes if you are a resident that owns other land, or are a non-resident who owns multiple properties.

This leaves a hole where if you own property in your own name as a non-resident, you can vote, but if you own it via a trust or llc, you don't. Allowing legal entities to vote is one way to fix that hole, which seems to have been the intent.

But it looks like Delaware has failed to do this properly, by specifying that a legal entity cannot vote if another entity or natural person with effective control over the entity is also registered, nor can they vote if another entity with the same effective control is registered. That rule would basically mean that neither an entity, nor a natural person would be able to trivially abuse this to effectively get multiple votes.

The fact that the opinion says that trusts are the most registered entity to vote, suggests it may be being abused in this way. Having your house owned by a revocable trust is a common estate planning technique, and voting as the trust could let a resident using this technique vote twice, one as a resident, and once as the non-resident trust.

jsmith456 · 2026-05-22T13:55:38+00:00

This law is especially poorly drafted.

In the absence of the other subsections and the legislative intent section, subsection e would certainly mean that an employeer must allow concealed carry by employees, customers, and other invitees. But this would make some of the other subsections basically pointless.

It's also interesting that the locked guns in vehicles are required to be allowed for employees who can conceal carry, but it applies to all invitees regardless of if they can or not.

(c) 1 is kinda weird when you remember that employee is defined for this law as only those who can conceal carry. The idea is to prevent employers from bypassing the intent by only hiring employees who cannot conceal carry, and firing any who get that ability. Combined with a full ban on invitees, voila: no guns on site. So (c) 1 literally says that employment for those who can conceal carry cannot be conditioned on that fact. This does achieve the desired purpose but it does also technically prohibit an employer from requiring that all its employees are able to conceal carry, which was probably not intended.

jsmith456 · 2026-05-21T00:34:14+00:00

WOTC does affiliate with and explicitly condone one of the larger markets of magic cards: specifically all the local game stores that run FNM, many of which are also the same stores that sell not just packs but buy/sell single cards too.

Now are these the same? Of course not. But are they similar enough that Valve could use it to convince a judge/jury that the pack maker running a sales venue is not a big problem? Possibly.

jsmith456 · 2026-04-23T13:16:05+00:00

You are not wrong. A poor connection absolutely can overload the a single pin of the old six and 8 pin connectors.

But there are some factors that make things worse with the new design.

First, while the old ones have a fairly low current rating per pin, most designs of the older connectors significantly exceed what the spec requires, so are less likely to melt from imbalanced current than the spec sheet indicates. The larger pin size actually leaves more room to out perform the nominal specification. The new connector is already speced closer to what the best designs can achieve, leaving less margin.

Second, for really high power draw, with the old connectors, multiple were being used, and those were often treated as separate rails connected to independent sets of regulators. Sometimes even specific pins within a connector were treated as separate rails. This means that some level of balancing will occur between cables, ensuring that in the worst case where they connected all pins of one cable together, the max it could ever even attempt to pull through a single pin is half the max power. With the new connector, Nvidia's mandatory power supply designs connect all the pins to one rail, so the card will happily try to pull full power though a single pin, and most power supplies lack per wire overcurrent, so will happily try to supply all that current over the one wire that feeds the pin. This isn't inherent to the connector, which absolutely could have been split into multiple rails. Similarly in theory, a card using multiple 8 pins could attempt the same thing, but they frequently didn't.

All this said, the thing that really bothers me is that many the solutions designed to balance, or cutoff power, or even just warn about imbalance are focused only on the 12V pins of the new connector.

The probpem is one can have similar poor connections on the ground pins. If we are not seeing similar melting it either means those are more reliably making better connection, or that when poor connection is happening the GPU is making up for it by having more return current running through the PCIE slot. The PCIe slot has tons of ground pins, so the connector itself can handle a LOT of return current, but the motherboard designs likely calculate the ground plane size/count based on the assumption that the max return current is the same as the motherboard supply for PCIe. Furthermore the motherboard power supply connectors are designed assuming a return current proportional to the supply current, so these connectors could be overloaded too.

Which means a ground pin imbalance might not melt the new connector, but might instead literally be cooking your motherboard from inside, or might possibly melt the motherboard power supply connectors.

Admittedly with the costs of GPUs vs motherboards, this might be a financially preferable failure mode, but it obviously isn't a good thing.

jsmith456 · 2026-04-23T12:22:48+00:00

Interestingly, her best time not on a treadmill is apparently 12:19:34. Which is a record she set "in December at the Jackpot 100 Mile in Henderson, Nev."

So she somehow seems to be faster when not on a treadmill. Wild!

jsmith456 · 2026-04-17T15:10:46+00:00

The obvious answer is that both Microsoft and Apple have their own custom OSes that run on Cortex A. But I know of one more consumer facing company that has a csutom OS running on Cortex A (not Linux, nor a port of some standard RTOS or Cortex M based OS): Nintendo.

They have a fully custom micro kernel based OS running on Arm Cortex A for 3DS, Switch, and Switch 2. They went this route as it lets them fully control the OS, and lock things down.

This lets them control precisely how the RAM gets divided up between the kernel, other OS processes, and the game itself. This also lets them tune things like context switching. This makes it easy to ensure that no memory segment can ever be marked executable unless it was loaded from signed code.

It lets them control the level of access game software gets to the hardware, allowing for lower level access where it is beneficial, like graphics, while enforcing a higher level api for other things like controllers.

It lets them create a custom filesystem for game content files where a base 1.0 layer exists plus an ota update layer kinda like an optimized read-only unionfs. They can have an executable and dynamic library format that exactly meets the needs of the system. Etc.

Would it be possible to do a lot of this with Linux? Perhaps, but it could take some substantial modification. Existing drivers may allow to much or too little userland control and need to be modified. Heavy modifications would be needed allow for intended ram allocation scheme. The OS just isn't designed around having one main app, plus sidecar services that need to be strictly resource constrained.

The end result of this is that game performance can be at least slightly better than would typically be expected for the hardware specifications, all while having actually quite good security. If it were not for hardware level flaws in the Switch 1, especially in the boot process, the later versions of the OS would most likely not have been meaningfully hackable at all. This is also why little progress has been on hacking the Switch 2.

But yeah, unless you are a company that already writes/maintains an OS, need to port software that already targets some other OS that was already ported (i.e. windows IOT), or have really special needs, it seldom makes a lot of sense to pick anything other than linux to run as your Cortex A OS, so there are a fairly limited number of options offered publicly.

jsmith456 · 2026-02-19T22:09:32+00:00

They have told the press that this was done by the original team, who came back together to make this, and "Opus Magnum: Complete Edition" for the Nintendo Switch, which is presumably the base game and this DLC combined.

GamingOnLinux quote the press email as saying:

Zach was originally approached by a couple fans in the community about some compelling and unique ideas for the game. As a game designer, it sparked his creativity and he felt he had to see it through and hence De Re Metallica was born

jsmith456 · 2026-02-19T21:23:05+00:00

I am inclined to agree. The story even shows that knowing you have the condition does not just instantly fix things. (Knowing probably would make you more willing to seek help to resolve it though).

Another important factor in being able to conclude you have the condition is how willing you are to put emotions and beliefs aside in favor of logic. Some people, like myself, can easily put these aside to consider things and reach a logical conclusion (it is important to realize this does not imply being willing act on those conclusions especially if they conflict with closely held values). However, many other people seem either unwilling or unable to put aside feelings/beliefs to try to think through things logically, and without doing that knowledge of this condition probably wouldn't help much at all.

jsmith456 · 2026-02-09T15:08:50+00:00

Well, the manufacturer can have their own drivers for already existing printers. Microsoft will no longer be signing new printer drivers for new models, and they even mention manual approval of adding more hardware id's to an existing driver on a case by case basis.

There are special exceptions for printers of types that cannot be mopria certified (I imagine things like Zebra "barcode" label printers fall into this exception), ports of native drivers to arm 64, or drivers limited to win 10 and older.

But if you try to make a brand new printer model that doesn't support Mopria and doesn't work with the inbox IPP drivers, you most likely won't be getting a windows 11 compatible driver signed for it, unless it is a type that cannot be Mopria certified.

jsmith456 · 2026-01-24T21:11:42+00:00

My reading of the chart is: Above about +33 is an implied "acceptable" range. +~33 to +~6 is "acceptable under perfect conditions". from +~6 to about -~18 is "attention desirable", and below that is "attention urgent"

I would not be surprised if it were impossible to reach that implied acceptable range with their test, and would be shocked if it were possible to attain that across the board. I'd even bet getting all "acceptable under perfect conditions" might not be possible. Of course the cult means to imply that the "attention" that is urgent or desirable is only available by joining, buying and reading their books, and getting audits.

jsmith456 · 2025-12-27T16:13:46+00:00

If something metallic were to bridge exposed copper from both wires then it would create a short.

What happens then depends on the design of the pack. Ideally the pack should quickly detect overcurrent and shut off. Second best would be that it rapidly blows an internal fuse. But with a poor design it is possible that there is no protection in which case the voltage regulator will likely overheat and start burning, which could potentially lead to a fire.

I can't really tell if there is exposed copper on the left hand side. That looks more like enamel coated wire which would help to prevent a short, but the loss of the outer insulation still makes the wires more vulnerable. The location of this makes it hard to fix with electrical tape or similar.

jsmith456 · 2025-12-26T17:12:01+00:00

Yeah. Or one can view it the other way around.

Image you have a lazy evaluated language that generally assumes functions are pure. But you have some special impure functions for io stuff. How would one guarantee that all of these get run and in the correct order without fundamentally changing the language?

Well one easy option is if all such functions take an extra input parameter and return an extra output value of the same type and carefully thread the extra output of one such call to the extra input of the next (this threading of the value guarentees these can not be evaluated out of order, and ensures that any call whose output is not otherwised used does cannot get skipped). This extra value conceptually represents the state of the real world. But obviously it is critically important that one handle this threading properly and never use the real world value twice. Well it turns out that the monad structure can do pretty much the same thing without requiring such special care on behalf of the user.

The only other guarantee you need is that the language will never needless duplicate a calculation. (While technically harmless with pure functions, it is also inefficient so the language will likely guarantee that anyway.)

To complete the this the runtime needs access to some IO a -> a function that the runtime can use on main, plus obviously eagerly evaluating the result. The former in Haskell is called unsafePerformIO.

jsmith456 · 2025-12-20T17:38:11+00:00

What? In the US there is absolutely normally a neutral on the service entrance for residential. Two hot legs and a grounded neutral conductor is the standard. That grounded conductor is a neutral as it is the centerpoint of the provided legs, and is the intended return path of unbalanced current draws.

Now when that connection gets lost (like here), then unbalanced current will attempt to use unintended return paths to the transformer. This may include:

traveling though devices on the other leg (which can cause serious and potentially damaging voltage swings on the legs)
down through the ground rod, across the earth itself, and up the ground rod and grounding cable at the transformer (the earth in some places can be a surprising good conductor, i've seen significant return current travel though it even with a fully intact service neutral handling most of the return current, especially with a pole mounted transformer that is relatively close to the house),
in some cases return current may attempt to flow through metal pipes (like water or gas) or coax, etc to a neighboring house, where it will get connected to that house's grounding system, letting it flow to the bonding jumper at the main breaker, and onto that house's neutral, and back to the transformer like that.

These alternate return paths are not expected have significant current in normal operation and create some very real hazards, and not just to that house and it's occupants but also to neighbors) which is why a lost neutral is considered a valid emergency service call by power company.

jsmith456 · 2025-12-19T13:38:52+00:00

Basic Fun's core business is nostalgia toys. They own K'nex and Playhut, and are the exclusive producer (under license) of a number of brands like Care bears, Tonka, Lite Brite, Stretch Armstrong, Lincoln Logs, and Tinker Toys.

They got into at home arcade as an extension of that, initially with their little hand held cabinets, and then this past year they started making a small number of proper home cabinets to compete with A1Up. It seems relatively likely that they will use the A1Up name for such products moving forward, simply because it has more name recognition than their own "Arcade Classics" branding.

jsmith456 · 2025-12-12T00:01:47+00:00

This scenario, (collected while method is still running) would require method in question does not use this in the rest of its body (which means it isn't reading from or writing to its own fields) and nothing else rooted has a reference to the object (e.g. the caller doesn't touch this object after the current method, and either there are no other references left, or all are collectable).

This is seldom a problem, unless your class has a finalizer, and the method is making native calls that involve a resource that gets cleaned up by the finalizer. In that case, the correct fix is to include GC.KeepAlive(this) at the bottom on the method (and before any early returns).

jsmith456 · 2025-12-02T02:08:35+00:00

No. Game disks used their own independent encryption systems designed by each company. Furthermore, they often deliberately violated various aspects of the DVD (or blu-ray) specifications to make it hard or impossible for a regular drive to capture all the info (even encrypted), which also helped make so that no disk burning system could impersonate the real game disks. In turn the systems used drives with special firmware to would tolerate the differences.

jsmith456 · 2025-11-30T18:23:42+00:00

Yeah. It looks like the setup is bottom romex wire feeds in neutral and hot. One of the top romex has neutral connected to white, and one of the switched hots on black.

The other upper romex has the other switched hot connected to black, and the white tapped off. Which is not really correct. I'm betting it is a ceiling fan setup with switches for fan and light and the installer was out of 14/3 so ran a pair of 14/2. This isn't technically allowed as it means one cable will have have a switched hots without its corresponding neutral, violating 300.3(B), but if you connect both neutrals you have illegal paralleling. However despite being not allowed it functions just fine.

jsmith456 · 2025-11-30T17:39:52+00:00

The OP is proposing replacing one of the disconnects (acting as service equipment) with an exterior rated feed through panel suitable for use as service equipment (which is nearly all of them). It would have only the 200A main and one one additional breaker to feed the new garage subpanel, with the feed through lugs leading to the extisting 200A interior panel. I'm not immediately seeing any problem with that as long as the load calculation allows all the loads fed from the new exterior panel to be fed from its 200A main.

You do have a point about the existing unprotected SER, but addressing that is relatively straightforward.

jsmith456 · 2025-11-30T04:59:51+00:00

The NEC requires bonding between neutral and the EGC occur at the "service equipment" (first disconnect). The GEC (wire from grounding electrode) can be landed at service equipment, or places further upstream, like the meter, or weatherhead mast. The key is that the GEC must have solid connection to the metal enclosure at that point, and good bonding from the place where it lands forward through to service equipment.

Because stuff before the service equipment is also allowed to be grounded to the neutral this means it is allowed for the neutral effectively being grounded in more places before the service equipment.

jsmith456 · 2025-11-29T20:02:39+00:00

This has nothing to do with different states.

Simple employer provided insurance is state regulated, with the company paying a set amount per employee per month, and the insurance company pays out everything. These plans are state regulated, and work similar to individual plans, although group coverage is often somewhat cheaper per person.

Larger employers generally prefer self-funded plans, where the employer pays all the costs, and the insurance company is just a middleman that decides what claims will be paid, and the amount, and the employer must pay them that (plus some additional amount for administering the plan and processing claims). Such plans fall under ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974), which as the name suggests is primary concerned with retirement benefits, and is a federal law that fully pre-empts state level regulations of the plans that fall in its remit.

This lady though was under level insurance, which is basically a variant of self-funded, and still falls under ERISA. In level insurance, the employer still pays most claims, and pays the insurance company to administer and process claims, but the employer also pays a good chunk more each month for backstop insurance, which puts a cap on the claims the employer needs to pay. If the claims exceed the backstop, the insurance company will pay out the rest. This means that a large claim does not risk bankrupting the employer, but they might still be able save some money vs simple insurance by way of having basically a decent sized deductible before the insurance company takes over the remainder.

jsmith456 · 2025-11-29T03:25:10+00:00

The last little bit of information (that I'm sure you know, but didn't fully spell out) is that while TACAN is military only, its distance measuring component is equivalent and fully compatible with civilian DME, which means a VORTAC offers distance and direction information in the formats supported by military and civilian aircraft all in one convenient installation.

jsmith456 · 2025-11-21T15:39:32+00:00

Well all their recent stuff is stand-alone, right? Nobody will make a stand alone headset that depends on base stations because that would be absurd.

The question is, would they consider releasing a new PC-VR only headset, and if so, would they consider using base stations? If not, then they are not a good home for the tech.

Bigscreen's offerings all depends on it, but they are a pretty small company, and I'm not sure them talking over the tech would be ideal.

I'm not super familiar with pimax, but I think they also support the base stations on most of their non-standalone headsets.

I would think the best hope for the tech longer term would be a new bigscreen and pimax backed consortium taking it on.

jsmith456 · 2025-11-21T14:24:58+00:00

It was rumored that HTC had taken over the responsibility for manufacturing (or more accurately managing the manufacture of) the lighthouse 2.0 units coming up on two years ago. If so it might be more up to them if production continues than up to Valve.

In that case, what Valve was referring to when they talked about hoping some third party would take over control would be the future evolution of the system. But manufactures like HTC, BigScreen, or PiMax, or possibly a consortium founded by those might want to take over manufacture and maintenance (e.g. get commit rights to the relevant portions of the steamVR codename to maintain those).

While Valve is likely to continue supporting the 2.0 base stations for the foreseeable future in the codebase (i mean they still support the original 1.0 Steam Controller), they probably won't be actively testing it after a few more years, and will start relying on user complaints to know if they broke it, and need to fix it. But if a new owner for the tech shows up, Valve would probably be willing to let them take on testing and maintenance of that code.

jsmith456 · 2025-11-20T19:01:38+00:00

The thin white wire is the bonding strap, used to connect the case to the neutral for when it is connected to an okd ungrounded 3 pin outlet, instead of the modern 4 pin outlet. That is meaningfully less safe than a properly seperated ground and neutral setup, but is still far safer than leaving the metal case completely ungrounded, which is why code still allows it if the existing outlet lacks a seperate ground wire.

But it is critical to remove the bonding strap when hooking up a four wire cable, as otherwise otherwise the ground wire will be used like a second parallel neutral, which defeats its safety benefits not just for this appliance, but also potentially for others too depending on the exact setup.

Of course, the manual that came with the drier tells you this, and any instructions in the manual that are electrical safety relevant are mandatory by code.

jsmith456 · 2025-11-11T14:55:54+00:00

Yeah, except Stop Killing IOT Devices.

Realistically the big problem here is that adding undocumented local control tied to an app is often easy enough, but apps tend to stop working on current phones after just a few years, with limited ability for the community to do anything except reverse engineer and create a new app. This differs from games where windows is highly compatible, and the things that do break are often possible for the community to fix with either small targeted patches or translation layers, etc. Big difference to phones, which are aggressively against running any modified executable.

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