Em Adespoton

The problem is, once the middlemen gain power, they’re never gonna give you up. Music producers are a great example of this, as are telecoms companies.

All the current SaaS stuff is similar; the offerings LOOK similar, but they’re explicitly designed not to be a 1:1 match, so you can’t just take your business elsewhere, just like the mattress companies of old.

We’re even seeing this play out in the streaming video market, where each player has its own differentiator, moreso than we ever saw with traditional cable TV.

Standards are great, but middlemen have no incentives to not subvert them.

So… doomed?

Yeah; my reaction to the headline was “…and good riddance?”

I never signed up for Facebook in the first place because I knew some of the people involved in the original Facebook. I didn’t want them getting their hands on my personal info because I knew what they’d do with it… and they did.

The phone isn’t going to end up in China from people passing them hand to hand; they’re going to be collected somewhere and bundled for shipping in an EM-protected covering of some sort. The record of the route they took right up until they go silent will be available for every phone. Looking at an aggregate map of this data should give the police a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

I suspect the difficulty is that the police need to get a data release from each individual involved and then get Google/Apple and/or the owners to voluntarily share the historical location data with the police… which most people aren’t willing to do out of an abundance of caution.

It must be so easy at this point… Russia can start a rumour and then get American pundits to authoritatively go along with it because it reinforces what they want to believe.

I had kids so that others don’t have to.

I like my kids, but I don’t like most other people’s kids. So yay, DINKs!

I get 4 weeks, plus sick days, plus parental leave, various types of training days and charitable days, plus a 2 week carry-over and I’m neither American nor European.

…one step at a time.

Wait… Star Wars has feet?

It’s not. But being an apex predator, there weren’t a lot even when their range covered most of Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

Your scale is off; imagine an Olympic sized swimming pool filled with ants with a lion in there somewhere.

Now imagine 39,000 of those pools, each with its own lion and ants.

Humans. Because the lions would be overwhelmed in short order after which the ants would kill each other off.

There are roughly 39,000 lions left in the world, none of which eat insects.

There are roughly 20 quadrillion ants on earth, a significant portion of which will eat live mammals, and almost all of which will kill any ant not from their own colony.

Let’s re-title that to “Owners are losing access to smartphone app updates and product features when companies go bust”

It’s exactly how Cloud SaaS is designed. It was a bad idea to do it with your smoke detector and smart lock, and it’s still a bad idea with automobiles.

That last bit is correct. The privacy commissioners are under-resourced and a large number of businesses are not actually compliant with the GDPR. Only a few highly visible infractions get addressed, and even with those the final result is not fixing the infractions and paying the fine; usually a small payment is made along with an agreement that the party will behave better in the future.

Ah, so you went for a phone battery in the end.

I just imagined what would happen to their GPUs if bricks were used :D

I’d also highly recommend reading https://endsoftwarepatents.org/2023/04/googles-decision-to-deprecate-jpeg-xl-emphasizes-the-need-for-browser-choice-and-free-formats/ — more than features and future proofing, the big issue here is patents. Google controls the patents for AVIF.

Then again, I use HEIF, which is alternately patent encumbered, and default to PNG and SVG for web-facing graphics.

What about things that may or may not constitute doping? Someone with some cold meds still in their system or who huffed oxygen before competition? Someone taking meds for a known condition that still had trace amounts in their system on the day?

There are many situations in which someone may have a foreign substance in their body that could provide advantage where they may be unaware that the substance is still lingering at competition time.

Not to mention, you’ll get people eliminating the competition by slipping them a mickey before the event….

It’s the 1990s all over again!

Big question is: who’s storing the email, you or them? Your mail clients handle POP3 and IMAP as well as SMIME and GPG so the server doesn’t have to have any special features itself.

Since you want something your wife can manage, stay away from the forwarders. Whatever you choose, check Spamhaus and SURBL to see if the provider has a history of getting on their lists.

Make sure you select one that can stay in business providing email service, so you don’t have to worry about the company collapsing/being bought out/pushing ads/selling PII/bundling mail with some more lucrative service.

I’ve been using vim/GVim for over 30 years; with only minimal tweaks I’ve used it with maybe 15 different programming languages/compilers, a few of which needed custom configurations written to do anything useful.

While everyone else is struggling to get on with the IDE du jour, I just get stuff done without having to learn anything new other than a new syntax and library set.