>Some will be bad, mainly the app stores that have to legally allow malware in, that can lift everything off your phone.

in case this bill becomes law, Apple will likely (be forced to) allow everything but introduce the "Apple approved" stamp and include "only allow to Apple approved stuff" checkbox in settings. it's actually not THAT bad if you think of it.

Bourne? is that the unix shell guy?

depends on your definition of "work" really. remember how steve jobs infamously told apple users to "avoid holding your iphone 4 this way"?

wearing masks is a measure, and as such it is evaluated at being effective given all the shortcomings and ineptitudes in the general population, rather than in lab conditions. in other words, mask efficiency is not just "% of infection prevention", it's really, in VERY broad strokes,

mask efficiency = "% of infection prevention" * "% of population wearing them properly" * "% of population picking proper materials" * "% of population replacing/washing them properly"

now THAT is a much lower number than just the first factor alone!

in a similar vein, vaccine efficiency is not just "% of infection prevention", it's really

vaccine efficiency = "% of infection prevention" * "% of vaccine does properly produced and packaged" * "% of vaccine doses properly stored and transported and administered", etc.

what you kinda really care about is the final number after all factors have been taken into account, and actions to mitigate their effect as well that have been taken as well. if that number is too low after everything else, welp, then masks don't work, even if they kind of do. otherwise, see steve jobs' quote above.

perhaps you're confusing intoxication rates with alcohol consumption.

intoxication occurs once BAC reaches certain values, which are roughly the same for every nation, however it takes vastly different amounts of alcohol to reach the same BAC for different folks.

an individual human DNA can have up to two main enzymes responsible for dissolving alcohol. most eastern europeans have both; most of the world has one; most east asians have neither. which means it takes a russian a few times more alcohol (vol) to reach the same state of BAC as an asian person of the same sex and body mass. that's how russians earned their reputation for being heavy drinkers, without doing much to achieve that -- whereas intoxication rates reflect desire to "drink until you're drunk", which is a bit of a different animal.

I hear ya.. but I really don't know if that is as easy as they make it sound. well maybe to Americans it is easy; there you usually get a student license when you're 15 and a half, and once you hit 16 and pass your exam then all world is yours for the taking, so to say (if you have a car that is). if everyone around you is like that, then yeah I guess you assume it is as easy for those who have never driven before as it is for those who have, for most of their life.

my situation was somewhat like yours back then -- I was 39 at the time and never had any driving experience before, as I would just take metro everywhere. so it took me a good two months' worth of lessons and one failed attempt to pass an exam that was even that easy. my CA friends then basically insisted that I absolutely need to get my license ASAP, because "it gets harder and harder to start driving as you get older", and I'm sure they had a good point.

well, most of CA highways have speed limits of either 65 or 70 mph, and I never felt that was too much for me to handle. :)

at my driving test (around 10 years ago in CA), there was no parallel parking, no traffic cones, not even U-turns -- just 20 minutes of driving around, with a single stopping at the curb. to me the DMV's approach to driving appeared to be "we'll give out licenses to anyone who barely qualifies and then we'll take them back if they cause too much trouble on the road". given my following experience driving (main in the Silicon Valley area and the rest of CA), that approach may have been working out better for them than it looks on paper. and, there were very few roundabouts there though; most T-intersections in residential areas were 4-way stops, so I'm not surprised US drivers unused to roundabouts would treat them similarly.

except that is not how it actually works. being able to hide your account name from readers while still having to register an account to post from is not the same as posting anonymously. nice try though

the powers that be are (somewhat) losing their monopoly on spinning narratives that they consider beneficial.

whether this change is for better or for worse, that remains to be seen.

SafeAndSound

there are some forum solutions (like Steem/Hive) around but an actual chat would be useful. (there's no need to store assets on the blockchain itself - just the messages, so space is not an issue. and, there are a few dapp-friendly blockchains around already.) for someone reason no one bothered yet. it's not even impossible to make it work with IRC...

are you describing TFA? :)

erm. the whole reason behind this Ether price increase is due to it starting its transition away from GPU- and electricity-intensive Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake where you buy these coins and stake them to be able to get new ones. so this particular event is GPU-friendly and not the other way round...

well there's now Chia that allows you to stake (really just lease) your SSD storage space.

currently, blockchain is basically an open world-wide replicated database accessible to everyone which operates in such a fashion that it pays (in its cryptocurrency) to those who host it (node owners). today existing chains can mostly hold short pieces of information, perhaps enough to run a text-only Twitter clone, but not enough to do much of anything else. now with Chia, the blockchain could eventually evolve to the state where it can hold ANY kind of information in this database, as there would be no necessity to store the data on the chain itself, just to use the blockchain to index it and manage redundancy. oh boy.

you are actually on the right track there. the blockchain technologies asked the same question - a few years ago and ended up with what is known as Proof of Stake consensus, which is where Ethereum is eventually headed - instead of burning electricity solving useless mathematical problems ("Proof of Work" consensus), you deposit ("stake") the cryptocurrency you own and earn interest by "minting" (not "mining") currency. there are a few ways to make it work depending on how the next coin is minted based on timestamp, but ultimately it's no longer tied to GPUs.

that said, Ethereum in particular has plenty of other problems that limit its usefulness in various regards, but it certainly has many large players backing it. blockchain is a new technology that evolves rapidly so many things will change before there is a clear winner.

1. these domain names are stored as data part of an NFT (a type of "smart contract") which are in turn are part of a transaction on Ethereum blockchain. these NFTs make sure they can only be issued by Unstoppable Domains.
2. anyone can create a standard on domain names (or pretty much anything else for that matter) stored on a blockchain; all that matters is whether majority (and eventually everyone) agrees to use one service and not some other. I'm not sure if there is competition to Unstoppable Domains, but there could certainly be in the future.
3. in a similar vein, there is nothing that mandates use of Ethereum blockchain in particular; pretty much any blockchain that supports smart contracts (i.e. almost all of them) will do.
4. blockchain itself cannot* be tampered with because of the way it functions. however it is theoretically possible for the community of miners to agree on rolling back ("forking") the state of the blockchain to a certain state in the past because of some extenuating circumstances. it happened a few times in the past, but it isn't very likely and is not Ethereum-specific, despite what multiple anonymous cowards shilling for Bitcoin will be sure to tell you.

*for certain meanings of "cannot". cba to explain, but basically not very likely at present