Multipass!

No idea how other carriers do it. T-Mobile and two of my international carriers have you set up a PIN alongside your account. You can't perform certain account changes, including reassigning an eSIM, without it.

Moving the eSIM to a new device is trivial if you have all the right validation answers, and a royal pain if you don't. It's no different from some banking services, with the added advantage that none of the information you must provide is personal.

Cheers,

No charges. My iPhone was upgraded before November, but my girl's was upgraded in late December, when she got a new iPhone for Christmas. I have everyone at home on a business plan with 4 lines. There were no issues and no additional fees for moving her eSIM from the old to the new iPhone.

T-Mobile does try hard to get me to buy the devices from them - screw them, it ain't happening. It's a lot cheaper to put some money aside every month in the "smartphone upgrade ETF" and upgrade to a new, top of the line model every 3-4 years. I wait until a given feature is available before I upgrade (e.g. 5G on the device).

Cheers!

Thanks for the heads up on Airalo -- I will give them a whirl next week during a day-long layover/explore the city somewhere. The service looks nice. I wouldn't use it for stays over 3 days -- their prices are too high. But for a tactical layovers it looks like a good option.

Cheers!

Ah, understood your use case. Yes, makes sense. In the case of T-Mobile (my US carrier) you're right: you have to spend 5-10 min on the phone with them switching the eSIM from one device to another. I had to do that when I moved from my 3+ year-old iPhone to the new one last year. Very smooth on a regular day, yet I can see it becoming a chore on a busy day for iPhone support.

There's a resurgence of regular, retro mobile phones in Asia these days. I'm tempted to get a Nokia look-alike and go back to simpler times. Might try that to see if/how it plays with eSIM-to-SIM / device migration.

Take care and cheers!

This is inaccurate, at least for Apple devices. I have had up to 5 different eSIMs defined at any one time (I travel a lot), out of 8 possible slots. Any two can be active at any time. Right now I have the ones for my US and Thai lines active, other countries are dormant until I want/need them. eSIMs also give you flexibility to buy decent service before you arrive at the destination country (e.g. I'll stop in Taiwan in a few ways, can buy and keep a SIM ready until I land, then activate it).

There's a slight chance that your comment applies =IF your device is on a deferred payment plan/mobile operator locked. I always buy my mobile devices outright, unlocked, so that I can put whatever SIM I want without dealing with 90-day carrier restrictions or similar. I never understood why Americans (yes, I'm American) love getting phones locked to operators. It's an expensive and limiting proposition.

Cheers!

Indeed -- people writing non-trivial geographical applications use ArcGIS to identify things like flood zones or other purpose-specific locations beyond pure navigation. The ArdGIS geolocation data is expensive and leads to various commercial data providers within that ecosystem, navigation is more commoditized.

Cheers!

Throwing support behind OpenStreetMap would be the logical, moral, and smart business move but they won't do it because of short-term greed. They want control over the content as much as over the end-user experience. Tom Tom being in the mix guarantees that they won't pursue OpenStreetMap because it hurts their interests.

ArcGIS and others thrive on adding value to the maps, not only focusing on streets and navigation. This effort is bound to fail and maintain the Apple/Google duopoly because, from the description, it brings no added value or innovation to the space. Smart folks and startups will gravitate toward OpenStreetMap, commercial applications toward ArcGIS and similar, and this abortive effort will remain in Limbo.

Thoughts?

Agreed. The impact to the rich will be on their balance sheets. So what we're really saying here is that the balance sheets of the rich are more important than the lives of everyone else.

We hit an interesting point a few years back. In parts of the Persian Gulf states the wet-bulb temperature got too high for survival. What that really means is that the temperature plus humidity got so high that you can't sweat yourself cool enough to survive. Air condition is necessary for survival, and that means a power grid, too.

More areas have been added to that list, and this year parts of the US south are now too hot to survive without air conditioning. These areas are one long-ish power blackout away from mass death by heatstroke.

I don't like ads, but I understand that they have to pay for content, so I don't use ad blockers, don't have any installed.

What burns me is the sites that tell me to turn off my ad blockers - which I know I don't have. When you dig just a little deeper, what they really want is to track me. I've DO have stuff installed to prevent tracking, and I'm not about to remove that stuff or turn if off. I have tried to give site feedback about this, but they won't let you to the site feedback page without allowing tracking.

They lose my eyeballs. I turn away, go somewhere else.

The other big burn is that one of the sites that has done this is "alternet.org", which should be a site that understands not wanting to be tracked - yet they, or their advertisers, are insisting on it.

By my observations, youtube isn't doing this. They serve me ads and don't trip the tracking stuff. When it lets me skip, I do. Sometimes I end up watching ads, or let them run while my eyeballs are elsewhere.

Because people with high clearance sometimes want attention too, and that shouldn't be surprising. We have a lot of people with high clearance, you really expect 0 of them to be crackpots?

Of course there is. Denying funding for a program that doesn't exist changes nothing, so there are no actual consequences to the provision, so you do no damage by voting yes. On the other hand, voting no will get you accused of being part of the conspiracy hiding aliens, which is a political can of worms.

We're absolutely dealing with a cabal of conspiracy theorists, but our elected officials are too cowardly to go against them. It's the safer path to just make a show of it, it even gets you some media attention which is great name-recognition for re-election time.

Easy - buy land around Modesto or somewhere further east, send them there.

Many of us are tired of dealing with the drugs, mentally ill, and homeless problems through half-assed solutions. When interviewed, many homeless folk say they're in SF because the City makes it easy to be homeless. Let's cut the oxygen supply, not only eliminate the incentives but also create a hostile environment by enforcing loitering laws. That'd lead to a dramatic reduction or even elimination of the problem.

Years ago I asked Siri if she was in a relationship with Alexa and she said, "None of your business." I don't own an i-anything, but we had a relative visiting who did.

I've also found that Alexa has a much better repertoire of Chuck Norris jokes than Hey-Google. The latter has exactly two, and the second one is simply a brush-off explaining why there are no more.

Leaves me hearing Marvin's voice, "Brain the size of a galaxy, and they're asking me to set timers and tell Chuck Norris jokes."

Greetings!

Mine would've been lower but I didn't register to /. until about 3 months after finding out about it... Have an awesome day!

In addition to that, it's important to keep in mind that they want to be the ones to decide what the regulations are: "Murati said the company is constantly talking with governments and regulators and other organizations to agree on some level of standards."

They don't really want to be regulated, they want the ability to tell the government what the regulation should be. If the government were to regulate in a way that says, for instance, "all AI research must be open, and you must publish the methods and source" I'm pretty sure they'd be suddenly very anti-regulation considering their newer stances.