FriendOfDeSoto

Think about it

I have done that. I’m just more forgiving than you. They may have shot the go ahead scene and cut it for an unrelated reason. They may have decided not to want to get Romijn or Mount do another ADR session, which costs money. The Paramount/Skydance merger loomed heavily over this season’s production with tight budgets and uncertainty for the future. I’m not saying the episode is perfectly put together. I guess what I am saying is that you are hung up on one detail here. I suggest you give it the Elsa treatment.

This is my perspective: this is a silly show. They did a musical episode, which I really didn’t like. They did a documentary episode, which I could’ve done without. I feel Babylon 5 did a much better job with this kind of meta TV episode. They took the established “space dad” Pike character and made him unsure and hesitant this season and I don’t know why. They are taking a soap approach to relationships within the show. The show is a dead man walking with its end after 5 more episodes already decided. All new Trek shows have already been axed and I’m not optimistic about the success of Academy. S31… With all of this going on in the background I choose to smile that SNW exists and not cry because the stories are wonky here or there.

A dult R ecording S urveillance E nforcement

would be a better acronym if you ask me.

It did for me. Anything with file access will ask for permissions first time around. (Android 13)

I think “vibe scripted” is harsh. The writers were bumping against the restriction that they need ::: spoiler spoiler Chapel blood next to anybody when they enter or exit the place. That’s why the alien buys it. Scaredy pants tries to go out on his own and gets fried. They wanted to avoid another entrance/exit on screen to keep us guessing how this Star Trek Inception works. :::

It’s a version of “commander, you better take a look at this.” It keeps the suspense up for the audience as Riker saunters over, maneuvering over multiple chairs, to take a look at the corpse of the mortal enemy of the federation. In a real military, Worf would say something like “heads up, Romulan casualties on the premise, everybody be on the lookout.” That’s to prevent the commander or anybody else from getting shot by a possible half-dead Rom in the rubble. But that’s not great television. It’s just script writing 101.

Consider leaving reddit. Vote with your feet. I did when they made these API changes and I beat the FOMO with my furious anger.

A lot of good ideas like that died when reddit pulled APIs or made access to them prohibitively expensive for developers. They are so set on making you use their shitty app.

Gul Darheel* is dead and buried on Cardassia. Smug Dukat tells Odo he attended his funeral. That’s kind of a big ask for Bashir to accomplish resurrection from DS9.

Marritza suffered from the HDJ syndrome as well. It befalls characters whose death fits the story - and it is a more impactful ending with Kira almost mourning the loss of this guy.

*previously mentioned in the title but since edited out.

If you were using Photos as a photo roll app you need to stay angry at yourself a while longer. That’s on you when you should know you cannot trust the G. Don’t grant an app permissions to photos and videos that could sync it to the cloud. And as another precaution, don’t keep sensitive pictures in the DCIM folder. If I have to take pictures of sensitive documents like that I disable WiFi (sync set up on WiFi only), take the picture, move it to a folder that’s never backed up elsewhere on my phone, and then turn WiFi back on.

You are not normal because you care about these things. The normal user doesn’t care and that’s who they are catering for. I’m not excusing their behavior (I don’t like it either) and at the same time you need to be more on your toes.

I’m planning to move to Ente this year when my Google cloud subscription runs out. Not looking forward to the work it entails but to the [paints face blue] FREEDOM!

I think the future will surprise us with a new method of digital obfuscation other than bitcoin et al. Crypto is a bit tainted. We can only look at the tools we have available today to make a guess about the future. My belief is that we will come up with something new, something else that isn’t as speculative and volatile. People don’t want their bribes to be devalued because some people found their long forgotten hard drives with crypto wallets and eff up the exchange rate.

Maybe barter is the wrong word in this instance. I mean rudimentary, handshake trade within an equally rudimentary community. Farmer A has wheat, hunter B shot two deer. A agrees to give half a blurb of wheat to B for 2 blorbs worth of prime venison. Both make it through the winter. That’s what I meant.

I’m not Scandinavian or live there, I think they are possibly the most cashless countries today. I’m in Japan where we just moved away from fax machines for banking and cash is very much alive and well. So I don’t have any specific experience to share, just general thoughts.

how much longer until they take cash and browser-based banking from us?

I would question the framing here. I don’t think “the man” will come in and “take it from us.” The move towards digital money and online banking isn’t so much prescribed by a dark cabal than it is driven by convenience. If the majority of people didn’t find anything useful about it, they would not adapt these things like tap to pay or online banking.

Bartering wasn’t made immediately illegal when currency came in. Currency was made to make bartering easier and more fairly divisible. Things changed at a glacial pace to get to our modern economy.

Banks and credit unions do have an incentive to get you to do your banking online. They can close all their locations except for ATMs and get you to do your in-person interactions with a central video call center. That saves them labor costs and they like that.

And security agencies and the revenue service like people spending digital, traceable money. It cuts out the gray area where under the table shenanigans take place.

As far as a push to online banking is concerned, there are a few factors that overlap. The aforementioned labor cost issue for the banks. A lack of legislation or regulations to provide banking that is accessible to preferably all people online. And then there is competing regulations to make it safe for people to use. And with that you run into the issue that you need the two biggest mobile OS’s to get you access via the web or the app that does all. This is where we need to lobby our political leaders and the stance should be: don’t leave grandma in the lurch. We have more old people than young ones in most western countries, old people vote in higher numbers, let’s frame a way to preserve online banking in the most privacy-friendly manner around how an octogenarian should be able to use it safely. I think this is how you cover most bases with a good chance of success, even in the pre-authoritarian US. That should include browser-based banking and authentication means that don’t only depend on Google and Apple.

As far as cash or concerned there will come a point where governments and central banks just throw their hands in the air and say: it’s too expensive to keep printing and then maintaining the money in physical form. That’s it, we go digital, damn a possible apocalypse and the fact that when we do we will be absolutely hosed when that happens. And, realistically, even if we retained physical money during the apocalypse, the economy would still collapse. Wars have shown us that money is quickly replaced by barter of cigarettes, booze, and other desirable or necessary goods. So you’re “only” left with the privacy and liberty considerations to spend cash without anyone keeping a constant ledger. And I fear they will be drowned out by “hey, we can stamp out all drug trafficking” promises. Not realizing that like most rivers finding the sea most drug traffic participants will find a way in the new digital only system as well. And that gives me hope. I think we will see physical cash disappear this century. But at the same pace, people will find ways to avoid being tracked.

What can you do? Keeping your fingers crossed, become politically engaged with parties who want to protect old people in an online banking world, and vote for politicians who want to preserve cash. Just know that your best funded co campaigners will be the mob and tax dodgers.

but nobody is discussing this initiative

Well, go ahead. Discuss it. I don’t know what it is.

Not everything but a lot. The short answer is cost. This will be long and simplified simultaneously:

Ever since the latter half of the last century companies have really loved one way to reduce cost in manufacturing. And that’s labor. Go to a place where the cost of living is low and work those people to the bone for a pittance.

After WW2 a lot of stuff was made in Japan, then in South Korea and Taiwan, and then China. We have since moved on to places like Vietnam, Myanmar (when politically palatable), and India. All of these stories are different and the same. Japan’s industrial heartland was bombed to smithereens and had to be rebuilt, top of the line. People needed jobs, those people were good at it too, and manufacturing jobs went there. The economy grew, wages grew with them, and it became too costly again. Enter South Korea, after successfully democratizing in the 80s (I think). They looked at what Japan had done and did a version of that. The economy grew, wages along with it, and it also became too expensive. Enter the People’s Republic of China in the 90s, ready to blend communist political power with Manchester red capitalism. A billion people who need jobs. So they looked at what the other so-called tiger states had done and did a version of their own. The economy grew, wages grew with it, and they are teetering on the edge of being to expensive again. But their sheer size, both geographically and inhabitants-wise, keeps them in the game longer. Because the policies the communists implemented to grow and steer the economy are quite unique and perhaps the lack of having to explain everything (i.e. democratic oversight) puts them in quite a strong position. And over the last 30 years anybody who is somebody has gone to China. Big market to sell goods to, big labor force to make stuff, somebody else’s rivers to pollute. It was so tempting a deal that both the US and Europe blindly became very dependent on China. Certain base chemicals, e.g. for medicine, were almost exclusively produced there. I think there world’s entire canned mandarin industry is one village in the middle of nowhere. It takes time to change this. 47 is trying to do it the impulsive, not so thought through way (tariffs). But he may yet learn that you cannot make an iPhone in the States for the price suicidal youths put it together in Shenzhen. At the heart is always cost. Labor is expensive in Ohio, cheap in Guangdong. Slightly cheaper in greater Hanoi. If we could just stop the genocide and coups, Myanmar. India has a harder time catching up because - at least for the time being - there is democratic oversight. But the gravy train will move on. Subsaharan Africa will be the next big thing. Capitalism.

No. This is how the legal system works. When you appeal to a higher court, they can make a call themselves when massive mistakes were made at the lower level or they can say the lower court overlooked something and then make them redo their work. It’s a convenient choice for the higher judges not to have to do more work themselves. But it’s part of the process.

Loosely defined legal terms. A “computer program” can be copyrighted. You can write your own that does the same thing but you cannot copy the other code and slap your label on it. With a lot of imagination and bending the words of the shitty outdated law, you could say a website is also a “computer program.” You cannot just go into the code and change it, e.g. by blocking ads. The lower court ruling didn’t take this possible interpretation into account and now has to rule again with this in mind. Nothing’s been decided yet. We’re running a little hot in this thread on misleading headlines.

You would be building it on pretty much the same legal foundations. So it will just be history repeating.

Let’s take a deep breath and consider what’s happened. The Federal Court of Justice has sent the case back to the lower court. They have not ruled on anything. They have not said ad blocking is piracy. They have essentially said: lower court, you had 25 boxes to tick but you only ticked 24 in your ruling. Go back and do one that ticks all of them.

It’s entirely possible that the lower court will change its ruling based on the intricacies of German copyright law, which is shit. But it’s not very likely if you ask me. Regardless, whoever loses will appeal it again. This rodeo is far from over. And when it’s eventually over the technology will have moved on, with any luck the law along with it, and the only beneficiaries will have been the lawyers.

So the headline should read more like “German court does not rule out that ad blocking could be a copyright infringement.”

The argument that Axel Springer is just doing it for their love of democracy is also comical. Media pluralism is important, I agree with them that far, but they are stuck in an outdated mindset. They launched a silly tabloid Fox News wannabe TV channel and failed. They are trying to force eyeballs on their content like you are at a news agent. Meanwhile, news is happening on TikTok and so-called AI is going to reduce their page views to dust. By the time we get a final ruling they will have pivoted strategy 10 times to keep the c-suite in caviar while the established media business that made them successful is rotting away under their assess.

[Find in Page:] “Parent”=0 “Parents”=0 “Father”=0 “Mother”=0

It’s their job to guard their kids from this content first and foremost. It’s their job to put it into context for their children. But the article doesn’t even mention that any of this is a humongous failing of parents.

Next this commissioner will want to outlaw computer mice because they’re used to click pornographic content without verifying the age of the finger on the button. And roads because adult content actors use them to get to jobs.

The way forward is not banning or making worse all sorts of useful tools as collateral damage in this “think of the children” campaign. It is to get all adult content everywhere behind a barrier toddlers cannot break. We were fine with porn mags partially obscured on the top shelf at a news agent when that was a thing. And the salesperson making sure the customer wasn’t a minor. The solution isn’t closing all digital news agents.

And it’s quite telling that the existence of VPNs didn’t play a bigger part in this UK online safety initiative. Like it wasn’t obvious that when the west entrance to porn central was closed off, people wouldn’t naturally look for the ones in east, north, and south.

Edited typo

Touché. If I were in your place I would still try and find another forum, even if you ended up giving all your data to Discord or something like that.

One of the reasons is adversarial policies. They will sniff out you’re using a VPN and they will throw stuff at you. Oh, weird activity from your account. Oh, change your password. Oh, we need to get a proper ID from you. Unless you’re getting $$$ betting info, it just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Just out of interest: what’s on FB messenger that makes all the things you are willing to do to circumvent the grubby data tentacles worth it? I’m just asking because I came to the conclusion not to use FB a while ago and I haven’t looked back.