Comment Re:Ejector seat button (Score 1) 142
The power button on the new Dell laptop that work gave me is right next to the delete key.
The power button on the new Dell laptop that work gave me is right next to the delete key.
The other massive privacy problem with their service was that you couldn't opt out.
Oh, there was an opt-out mechanism where you changed your network's SSID to have "_nomap" at the end, but that was incompatible with all the other arseholes who want you to put something else in your SSID.
Look at how those companies are regulated in the EU. They oppose it, of course, but that doesn't prevent it happening or being effective.
If the concern is location data, why not simply ban the collection of location data?
It's a permission on Android and iOS, so it can be enforced easily. Speaking of permissions, the TikTok app only asks for approximate location, which Google says is at best about 3 square kilometres, so points of interest are going to be pretty large and vague. Users can always simply refuse to grant the permission too, it's an optional one.
https://play.google.com/store/...
Why does it need a total ban?
TikTok does influence Americans, but not because of anything Bytedance or the CCP does.
It's the place where gen Z posts videos about socialism and worker's rights. Right wing videos do very poorly. Gen Z is just a more left leaning generation than the previous ones, which is hardly surprising given the situation with the labour market, with education, with property ownership and rent, and with climate change.
What the right wing politicians want is for TikTok to start influencing them to be more conservative. They might dress it up as "American values" or pretending that people organically making videos are CCP shills, but that's the real aim here.
Note to whistleblowers. If you intend to do this, make sure someone else has the information you are willing to proffer, e.g. give a lawyer your notes, and make sure that it is publicly known that you did so.
It's only worth killing you if it will stop the release of information or make prosecution significantly harder, so don't keep it all in your head until the deposition or trial.
The front collision prevention system is quite limited though. If the car was doing 70, it wouldn't detect the obstacle or apply enough braking to avoid hitting it. It might have lessened the impact by applying the brakes.
The range is limited to prevent false positives when approaching bends.
If there was a failure of the autopilot, it was that it didn't monitor the driver well enough and they were able to stop paying attention for long enough to not avoid the stopped car.
If they cabin door hadn't been re-enforced against hijackers, he could probably have been stopped. In every example of a pilot doing this, the other pilot is out of the cockpit for some reason (e.g. bathroom break) and they lock the door.
The only solution that maintains the hijack proof door is to require there to always be two people in the cockpit, with another member of staff stepping in if one of the pilots needs to come out.
Here's a thought for you. Roads are free to use in most cases. Few countries price by the mile driven, although weight classes are a thing. They are funded from general taxation, with occasional toll roads.
So if electricity becomes so cheap that it's no longer commercially viable to not artificially inflate the price, wouldn't it be a massive benefit to the economy to subsidise it from taxation? Then it can be progressively paid for, and similar to roads there would be additional charges for heavy users etc. Most people would no longer have an electricity bill, and most small/medium businesses wouldn't need to worry about those costs either. Heavy users would get cheap energy because the government is motivated by reducing cost, not maximizing profit.
Decriminalizing drugs has worked really well in Portugal for over two decades.
https://transformdrugs.org/blo...
Fewer addicts, greater proportion in treatment, usage levels below EU averages, and a corresponding reduction in drug related crime. Consumers of drugs are treated as patients rather than criminals.
Siri has been neglected for a very long time. MKBHD does comparisons of Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and Samsung Bixby every now and then. Going back years, Siri has been struggling.
On the other hand, I've been testing Google Gemini and it's still a long way from being good. Often it contradicts itself in the answer, for example. I am seeing some improvement, but it's still at the point where at most I'd use it as a starting point rather than accepting anything it says at face value.
Europe is working towards electricity that is too cheap to meter for industrial processes. It's already happened in Spain, where in the last few weeks electricity prices have been below 10 Euro/MWh, sometimes under 2 Euro.
Nobody should be working 10 hours a day. It's unhealthy and reduces productivity. If that is "necessary", the business is under-staffed and needs to take on more people to do the available work.
Keep in mind that despite this unwillingness to do excessive hours, and love of DEI/human rights, Europe is the world leader in high end chip fabrication technology. ASML is pretty much the only game in town. Canon might become a challenger with their new tech, and Intel has been struggling for years.
So if anything, it appears that shorter working hours, more paid holiday, unlimited sick leave, DEI, unions, and strong employee rights are the secret to high end manufacturing and low cost energy. Of course, in reality it's far more complex than that, but since you brought it up...
A 4 day week is becoming a major draw for employees. If employers want the get the best people, or any people where there are shortages, they will need to start offering better work/life balance and lower hours.
One of the reasons they really hate TikTok is that gen Z is using it to organize unofficially, kind of like a union but done on social media and emboldening individuals instead of via collective bargaining.
Well, yeah, what I mean is that they don't simply wonder why the term is censored, or not realize that it is, they know about it. So all the Westerners thinking that they can help liberate China from communism by spreading the truth about Tiananmen and the Uyghurs are not going to get very far.
But yes, I agree that TikTok would not succeed in the West if it was censored like it is in China, but that's the point I was making. It's not that they "banned" TikTok in China, it's that TikTok is tailored to Western audiences. Other services can and do offer a different experience depending on location, e.g. WeChat services don't censor terms for accounts that are registered with a non-Chinese phone number. There is not technical reason why TikTok couldn't do that.
Ironically, much of the reason why the GOP hates TikTok is because it is a fairly left leaning place, but not because Bytedance is some kind of commie shill or whatever. That's just how young people are now. They see the system is screwing them and doesn't offer the opportunities they were told it does. Can't afford property, can barely afford rent, jobs are all going zero hours and crap pay, and the climate catastrophe is being ignored so they can deal with it when the instigators are all gone.
When times were good in the post-war years it was easy to sell capitalism, because it seemed to be delivering rapidly improving standards of living, while "socialist" (really communist, but Americans can't seem to tell the difference) countries were all starving and living miserable lives. It hasn't been working for gen Z though, and they can see how socialist ideas benefit Europeans. The internet made it impossible to get away with pretending Europeans aren't better off.
I'm not sure what to make of this comment.
Chinese people do know about Tiananmen, because the government got to them with the propaganda first. They were told that foreigners might claim it was a massacre, to undermine China. Same with the Ugyhurs.
The Pooh thing is only in relation to Xi, they do sell the merch at Disneyland Shanghai etc. I've been there and seen it with my own eyes.
Apologies if you didn't intend it that way.
When speculation has done its worst, two plus two still equals four. -- S. Johnson