I also strongly value privacy and honestly this kind of scheme always rubs me wrong. In the physical world, we have IDs, provided by the government, a business is only required to do a brief check and often does not have to retain information. This means that you can retain a fair bit of privacy for the individual, and the burden on the business is fairly low. And yet, for some reason, online we get the worst of both worlds: businesses have to figure out how implement cumbersome verification measures (which means small businesses/ hobbyists will struggle to comply) AND there is basically no privacy. How did we get there?
Yeah this particular system doesn't sound great. It seems like Epic are storing the fact you're verified and your email. I've definitely seen systems where they verify you and immediately delete the data.
Makes me wonder: why do we not have a government provided service? IDing people has, traditionally been a responsibility of the government. Even the private verification services ultimately rely on you showing your government issued ID at some point. If the governments want online verification, they should provide the tools and make sure they are accessible to all.
> Makes me wonder: why do we not have a government provided service?
Because every UKGOV since about 1980 has had an obsession with small government and farming out as much as they can to private contractors[0] regardless of consequences.
[0] Until those contractors fail to perform / go bust at which point the government steps in, things get better (shockingly) for a while, and then the government farms it out to another bunch of idiots who have ~bribed~ lobbied hard and the cycle repeats.
It sounds like a good idea to me and given the quality of some of the government tech services now in the UK I'm sure they could do a good job of it. But people are still against ID cards. Telling the government directly that you're viewing content on specific sites seems like something that would never be accepted.
We got here because adults cannot stop using the internet to victimize children. Education failed. Enforcement has largely failed. A loss of privacy is the next logical step until adults stop victimizing children. I use my nine year olds accounts fairly regularly and I’ve gotta tell ya mate, the number of dudes I meet who are pretending to be 9 and 10 year olds girls is pretty shocking. A loss of privacy stinks but at some point, society as a whole pays for the actions of very few. It’s the dark side of laws - they restrict freedom for everyone because a select few cannot be trusted with the tools we have at our disposal.
My thought on this is that parents shouldn't be giving 9 year olds accounts on any online service. But that doesn't seem to be something that is manageable for parents (no judgement). Would it make more sense for the government to completely ban children under x years from using phones/tablets? The internet? It sounds ridiculous but if an adult provided a child with alcohol or tobacco they would face consequences and therefore those things are controlled to a large extent. Could we do something similar in the digital world? Banning it at the website level is futile so maybe taking a step back to the devices themselves is the solution.
Looks like cotton has a self ignition temperature almost twice as high as paper. Considering it is already in use for dollar bills, we know that it already has a paper like feeling. So maybe this could be achieved with this material?
Don't forget Incogni, I was tempted to subscribe but as you point out, when you see the other kind of services/products youtubers tend to peddle, it gives me pause.
I am surprised they would pick 0 for the latitude, it seems that most of Europe, whether it's the land or the people is east of that. Maybe some important weather systems develop over the Atlantic and they want to track that?
It’s exactly that. In fact, information propagates along with the winds. If you don’t observe upstream, you instead propagate an information hole. Each new model run incorporates the output of the previous run to preserve sparse weather information. It’s not that there are few observations, it’s that Earth is really big.
I am not sure if I agree with the conclusion about the Windows 8 UI unification, I still believe it could have made sense. It's just that as is often the case with MS, they let a good idea go to waste by doing a half assed implementation, then backtracking...
The problem is that they bought into the iPad hype.
The correct way to build a tablet OS is to start with a desktop environment and optimize it - including third-party software - for fingers. We see this with iPadOS, which keeps getting hand-me-down features from macOS, implemented almost exactly the same as they are on macOS but with bigger tap targets.
In contrast, Windows 8 saw Microsoft taking the contemporary state of the iPad - single window, everything full screen, etc - and treating this as the future. Hell, I'm surprised they even shipped split-screen on it. They even locked down the app runtime to signed Store apps only[0]. My guess is that management saw dollar signs from how much Apple made from the iOS App Store and thought turning Windows into an "iPad Killer"[1] would replicate the same success.
Ironically, Windows 7 was already built to be a touch-friendly desktop, they just didn't actually finish making it touch-friendly.
[0] Which created a fun bifurcation between widget toolkits in the Microsoft ecosystem that persists to this day.
[1] Any time a company describes a product as a "killer" product, i.e. something intended to outcompete another product, they've already lost.
Strongly disagree. Windows 11 is EXACTLY what you describe and it's not a great tablet experience. IMO it's worse than 8, 8.1 or 10. I probably accidentally close a web browser about 5 times a day on my Surface from my palm brushing the X on the window controls while trying to enter something in the URL box or search bar or swapping tabs. Switching apps sucks. The gesture controls of 8/8.1 were really good and thought out for tablets (not desktops) and full screening apps made maximal use of space while making it hard to unintentionally quit something. Meanwhile on Windows 11 they have made gestures literally near useless and something I never want to trigger ever. Yeah, MS I want easy access to garbage tabloid news and some junk AI feature. Thanks.
What MS SHOULD have done is just left desktop Windows 8 be a lightly reskinned Windows 7 and only trigger the tablet UI in tablet mode on supported devices. But no, they had to make a bad mouse experience which soured everyone on 8's UI forcing them to backpedal.
Had the Surface RT launched at the same price with pen support I think it could have had serious legs as a device for students even with all the limitations. But no, another missed opportunity.
I remember when Windows 8 came out, I was curious how complex apps would work with the Metro interface. I thought MS would convert their own apps to it but that never happened.
I feel like that makes sense actually. One core tenet of the "free market" is the need for competition, otherwise complacency and rent seeking happen and things get bad. If that apply for corporations, why not economic systems too?
The market of markets must be free, or the idea of a free market is a myth. Which it is. Capitalism cannot simply be removed, it must be outcompeted by a superior usurper.
I am very conflicted on this. On one hand I absolutely despise that hating the children attitude and I believe we are reaping what we are sowing. On the other hand there are serial offenders that are not being dealt appropriately. My naive solution is to keep the current, more permissive system for first offenders and then treat repeat offenders as adults.
I mean if you are a teen, succumb to peer pressure and do something stupid like stealing a car, I fully believe that we should not throw the book at you. We need to dispel you of the notion that this is not a big deal and that you will get away with it, while ensuring that we do not harm your future prospects.
But if being arrested, handcuffed and taken in front of a judge is not enough to make you understand that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated, and you do steal a car again a few weeks later, then yes, we will have to escalate instead of saying "nothing we can do, it's just a kid". Otherwise we are literally sending the message that they can act with impunity.
I feel the real danger of back feeding is not that american line workers can't be bothered to check if the line is truly dead before starting to work. It's that the line could be reenergized at any time.
Automatic transfer switches are a thing, but generally you want the supplies sync’ed.
A manual break-before-make transfer switch will do the job. Not much help if you’re not home and the mains goes out and your food spoils, though fridges will stay cold for hours if left shut, and longer if there’s a lot of thermal mass in them - try to keep most of the empty space in your fridge and freezer filled with water bottles.
I haven't seen them doing that on power outage post storm line repairs near me, usually during those they're working as fast as possible because they have dozens of other spots they need to repair.
Also just the frequency with which work happens on the distribution grid. Most of Europe has almost all distribution lines underground (only running high-voltage transmission lines above ground), and unless somebody digs in the wrong spot they tend to just stay there. In the US meanwhile they are mostly above ground where they are susceptible to storms, falling trees, aluminum ladders and all kinds of other stuff that would cause a line worker to be called out
We already require juniors to go through a 4 years university degree. It takes a fair bit of time of real world work to get to the senior level. So unless we expect people to do another 5 years of schooling, I am not sure how this will happen (and even in that scenario I believe there is a difference between hands on, on the job experience and classroom experience).
it happened with architecture degrees in the uk. it went from 3 years to 7 years, as the skill levels and implicit knowledge required increased over time.
Access to it isn't. You can theoretically sue in federal court with a few hundred dollars in filing fees. It's not cheap, but not exorbitantly expensive either. It's representation that's expensive.
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