Apple essentially requires a passcode, and requires the passcode to re-enable biometrics. Biometrics are useful in that if you are keeping your phone on you it will generally unlock the phone, but after a while (like an hour) you need the PIN again.

The whole idea is that if someone gets their hands on your device while its out of your control, they can't use cloned biometrics to break into it. It just happens that the same thing applies when the FBI dredges a lake. The odds of them finding the phone, and getting it to your corpse in an hour, is minimal.

By design biometrics time out after a while. You can change the setting under "Settings, Face ID and Passcode, Require Passcode..."

Firmware updates require user consent (with passcode), or DFU mode which wipes the device. USB access requires user consent for trust, or DFU mode which wipes the device. After the phone has been idle for a while, the USB port is disabled for accessories, and requires user consent to enable, except for DFU mode that wipes the device.

Plus, MDMs can disable USB access. Our corporate network does for anything that is missing a specific certificate that has to be installed on a computer running Apple Configurator 2.

If I want to update the firmware, I either have to do it online and provide user consent ... or enter DFU mode which wipes the device.

Yep, burned to an archival-quality physical medium ideally.

The advertising can't state a discriminatory preference, or be shown in such a way as to achieve such a discriminatory preference. It would be illegal, for example, for me to advertise and tell a company "don't show me to black potential tenants".

OTOH, I've advertised jobs for developers on places like Stack Overflow, because that is where developers tend to be reachable. Unsurprisingly, Stack Overflow is around 93% male, with male developers being even higher than that, and extremely experienced developers even more biased than that.

I don't control the market, and I'll hire the qualified developers without regards to race or sex. As far as I know, I've never had an applicant who was black, but the confluence of highly experienced, developer, in this field means the applicants are near exclusively white men, asian men, and Indian men. We do get a fair number of LGBT applicants, though (especially trans applicants).

That's not discrimination, it's just the reality of the industry. I'm not going to run around trying to advertise in Better Homes and Gardens to try to find developers, because its a waste of ad money. I'm certainly ready, willing, and able to hire diverse developers - I'm just not able to create them, and not going to try. If I need to hire widget engineers with 10 years of experience, I will tell Facebook and LinkedIn and StackOverflow to target widget engineers with 10 years of experience, and hire the qualified applicants that come my way. It's not my fault or theirs if 99.5% of the people who meet those requirements for those good paying jobs are male.

The funny thing is that blu ray disks and DVDs can update the MKB, retroactively revoking keys for your player. So, as soon as you connect to the internet, or insert a newly purchased blu ray or DVD they can take away your ability to play disks already in your library.

They can also revoke HDCP keys using a similar process, so they can destroy your TV or monitors ability to play the content, too.

What are you going on about?

Of course I know trolls and biased people exist. I've seen quite a few of them telling me I'm going to hell at pride.

I still support their freedom to express their views, because I believe in pesky things called "rights".

One other possibility would be that Facebook uses interest-based targeting.

If men tend to mention or like Dominos, and women tend to mention or like Instacart, then Facebook will tend to target accordingly. That's not bias, that's knowing their market.

What makes you think I like Java? I rather despise it, though it's well suited to writing good code.

I'm personally a fan of .NET, but the combination of "needs to run on platforms other than windows with a GUI" and "none of my customers want to run IIS or mono" tends to leave me with few uses for it either client or server side.

I'm familiar with the newer changes they have tack welded on to PHP. It's still a fundamentally shitty language, even if the performance is better and packagist makes things better.

The funny thing about free speech is that popular, "safe" speech needs little protection. It therefore can't be "abused", because the ability to use it is intrinsic to the concept of being free.

That's why when stormfront was taken offline, I literally reached out and offered to help get them back online, despite them thinking that I'm a "degenerate beaner faggot that's going to burn in the fiery pits of hell". If those assholes are free to speak, then I know that I'm free to speak, because nothing I ever say is going to rise to the level of their filth.

In other words, I certainly don't agree with what they say, but I will defend their right to say it.

No. I believe that they want things that make them feel bad to go away, and to have the world reshaped in their image of what it should be, through whatever means necessary. It's often done, though, with the *justification* of protecting the innocence of others, hence my reference to the term. "Think of the children", says the person who wishes to silence and police the language of others.

A tool that lets them put on virtual earmuffs is much preferable to that.

Hate speech isn't a thing. Speech is speech.

If someone chooses to be triggered, then someone can choose not to listen to it, and this AI provides a tool for them to do so.

There's nothing dystopian about it at all. I value freedom of speech. Others don't. Let them choose to self-censor, let me choose not to, and we can all play the same game.

The alternative seems to be that they forcibly censor everyone so that the easily offended don't have to have their "innocence" threatened.

This guy sums it up way better than I can.

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09...

Java, love and hate it, has a relatively consistent design. It follows patterns, and has since the beginning.

PHP wasn't designed to be a programming language at all, and was originally a markup language only. OOP was a distant afterthought, and you still end up having to memorize which functions are (needle, haystack), and which are (haystack, needle). Sure, you /can/ write daemons in PHP, just like Java, but you really shouldn't. Every time there was some itch, something that someone needed, they added a feature, but it's just bolted on, and will have weird issues.

Space may be cold, but not in a particularly usable way.

https://science.nasa.gov/scien...

"The Station's outstretched radiators are made of honeycomb aluminum panels. There are 14 panels, each measuring 6 by 10 feet (1.8 by 3 meters), for a total of 1680 square feet (156 square meters) of ammonia-tubing-filled heat exchange area. Compare that majestic radiator with the 3-square-foot grid of coils found in typical home air conditioners and you can begin to appreciate the scope and challenge of doing "routine" things in space."

You can play games with a heat pump to get radiative cooling to work quicker, but you're still in a vacuum. It's like running a data center in a giant thermos.