No, the executive tells the civil service what it needs to do, but the civil service is wholly independent.

If that's what an independent agency is, then independent agencies are blatantly unconstitutional. "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America" is literally the first sentence in Article II. If it is serving an executive function, then the executive branch "calls the shots."

You do not appear to understand what a republic or a democracy is, so I'll ignore the last sentence.

"Independent" does not mean unaccountable to the people. The President is independent of Congress, and vice versa, but both are accountable to the people. Well, the current president doesn't seem to think so, but legally he is.

The civil service is not a part of the executive but is a co-equal branch.

You are correct. In principle, presidents have no authority whatsoever to dictate how an agency runs. The executive branch should have zero authority over the civil service, which is intended to constitute a fourth co-equal branch of government.

In the US, in principle, the status of the civil service as co-equal to, and independent of, the executive should be added to the Constitution and enshrined in law for good measure. Not that that would help much with the current SCOTUS, but a Constitutional change might possibly persuade the current government that absolute authoritatian control is not as popular as Trump thinks.

That is the idea that, in Britain, entities like the NHS and the BBC have operated under. Charters specify the responsibilties and duties, and guarantee the funding needed to provide these, but the organisation is (supposed) to carry these out wholly independently of the government of the day.

It actually worked quite well for some time, but has been under increasing pressure and subject to increasing government sabotage over the past 20-25 years.

It's also the idea behind science/engineering research funding bodies the world over. These should direct funding for grant proposals not on political whim or popularity but on the basis of what is actually needed. Again, though, it does get sabotaged a fair bit.

Exactly how you'd mitigate this is unclear, many governments have - after all - the leading talent in manipulation, corruption, and kickbacks. But presumably, strategies can be devised to weaken political influence.

Tokenization seems to mean taking an asset with value, creating a fake representation of it, selling that to someone in exchange for valuable money, and then laughing all the way to the bank. In the case of a bank doing this, the only difference seems to be that there is not as much laughing involved, because they are already at the bank. And in the case of a bank doing this with "stable" coins (that aren't actually stable), they're also skipping the "asset with value" step.

230 prevents sites from being prosecuted. So, right now, they do b all moderation of any kind (except to eliminate speech for the other side).

Remove 230 and sites become liable for most of the abuses. Those sites don't have anything like the pockets of those abusing them. The sites have two options - risk a lot of lawsuits (as they're softer targets) or become "private" (which avoids any liability as nobody who would be bothered would be bothered spending money on them). Both of these deal with the issue - the first by getting rid of the abusers, the second by getting rid of the easily-swayed.

USENET predates 230.
Slashdot predates 230.
Hell, back then we also had Kuro5hin and Technocrat.

Post-230, we have X and Facebook trying to out-extreme each other, rampant fraud, corruption on an unimaginable scale, etc etc.

What has 230 ever done for us? (And I'm pretty sure we already had roads and aqueducts...)

I'd disagree.

Multiple examples of fraudulent coercion in elections, multiple examples of American plutocrats attempting to trigger armed insurrections in European nations, multiple "free speech" spaces that are "free speech" only if you're on the side that they support, and multiple suicides from cyberharassment, doxing, and swatting, along with a few murder-by-swatting events.

But very very very little evidence of any actual benefits. With a SNR that would look great on a punk album but is terrible for actually trying to get anything done, there is absolutely no meaningful evidence anyone has actually benefitted. Hell, take Slashdot. Has SNR gone up or down since this law? Slashdot is a lot older than 230 and I can tell you for a fact that SNR has dropped. That is NOT a benefit.

I do not like this Sam-I-am, I do not like the JVM.

I wish I could say I'm surprised.

However, this has been a consistent pattern that goes back to the 1930s and I wouldn't raise an eyebrow if you corected that to the 1830s. Companies know that you make the most money by selling to both sides.

It seems to me that, if you were developing something like this, you'd want to write the encryption and decryption code separately from the non-trivial key management code, so that you can unlock it easily if someone accidentally locks the wrong system. You only make the build that doesn't have an obvious key when you're really going to use it. For that matter, it's probably wise to do your demos with the version with the master key, so that potential affiliates can't attack a real target for the demo. Then you give the version that doesn't make it easy to unlock to paying affiliates who aren't SentinelOne. It's not like they'd need to redesign the whole system to generate a random key and not write it in plaintext anywhere.

Silicon wafers are the wrong thing to compare against. The CZT semiconductors are like photodiodes (for other radiation), not what they make the logic out of. It would make more sense to compare with InGaN (for blue LEDs), which plays a similarly specific role in common devices.

This will be great for Haiku, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD installs, there's not the remotest possibility there'll be binaries for these. Not because the software couldn't be ported, but because the sorts of people politicians hire to write software would never be able to figure out the installer.