You are so wrong. The country I live in now has it. It's not called the same, but it amounts to the same. Near impossible to sue the police here.
I'm pretty sure most countries have something similar on the books.
I got a 'cold call' from what was actually a legit AI bot just a week ago (from a financial services company serving the loan for some home improvements).
stupid thing never understood "let me talk to a human" no matter how many times i tried.
it was legit, but i just gave up, hung up, called the same number back, and hitting the '0' operator, got a human who handled the situation in a matter of minutes, no frustration involved.
The key thing is the bot cold-called ME but wouldn't provide ANY verifying information that it was what it claimed to be. They have an account # for me, but they wouldn't tell ME it to confirm they were who they were and my account was what they expected to see. Not even something like "last 4 digits".
I mean, they ask US for last 4 digits of something but they won't do the same for us in return?
THIS IS A DAMN PROBLEM, because yeah, we need to have a way to trust that bot-calls from AI are who they say they are, because it is REALLY F'ING EASY to program a bot to do the psychic equiv of a 'cold read' as part of social engineering a scam.
I smell a rat.
Not sure anyone is having to provide an incentive. While in small quantities, old models of Chromebook might cost as little as $200 on sale, chances are good that schools are spending more like $400 to $500 on average for their devices.
At just $600 for the Neo (the current educational price), the cost difference is minimal now. And if your teachers are already using Macs, that's one fewer platform to support. And if the hardware lasts longer (to be determined), then that could easily make up the remaining cost difference.
I agree that it's a frustration to only have access to a single account at a time (in this case, an Apple ID), but I'll point out that this is the use case for probably 99.9% of their users. And there are some exceptions to this rule: Apple does have a mechanism in place that lets you use one Apple ID for music and a different one for their various App Stores, for example. However, this still doesn't let you use two Apple IDs for a single service at the same time.
I think the reasoning behind this is pretty solid: the UI problems involved in allowing multiple simultaneous logins to the same service are extremely complex, and if you're only looking at a frustration for a vanishingly small percentage of your userbase, it doesn't make sense to make it more complex for everybody.
It really isn't complex. Google does it just fine. You have an account picker in the upper right corner, and you choose which account you're using to interact with that app. No big deal.
Having a mechanism to use one account for music and a different one for app stores? Now that's complex. That's adding special-casing for each app that needs to handle a separate account, instead of designing the auth system correctly to support multiple accounts to begin with. It's almost always easier to do it right than to add a bunch of special-case workarounds everywhere.
I also disagree with the claim that 99.9% of users only have one iCloud account — not because it isn't currently true, but because it is true only tautologically. If the system is designed so that no person can meaningfully use more than one account, then no one is ever going to create or attempt to use more than one account. What this means is that no businesses will ever use iCloud accounts for their internal messaging system, etc. Apple is basically shutting themselves out of the business ecosystem altogether by design.
They've designed the system in a way that makes what you're saying true, so of course it is true. But that doesn't mean that 99.9% of users would not *benefit* from it not being true. In an ideal world, iCloud would compete head-to-head with things like Office 365. They have the tech, but limiting it in ways that make it useless for business purposes means they aren't actually competing.
The root cause comes from these twelve words:
Since only one primary account can be signed in at a time
Authentication systems that allow only a single signed-in account are defective by design. Approximately 100% of all people have more than one account that they need to be signed in with.
I have half a dozen Google accounts for specific purposes — one for work, one for personal, one for electronic music tablets to which multiple people share physical access, a couple of old domain-specific accounts that got converted from free work profiles, and I'm probably forgetting some. Not all of these are useful, but if I could not have continuous access to work and personal, it would be a tremendous pain in the backside.
And encouraging people to merge profiles like that is nuts. It all but guarantees leaks. A confidentiality agreement typically protects things you learned in the scope of your employment, but after you are employed, if they continue to send you confidential information, there's a decent chance that you aren't under any legal obligation to keep that secret.
This is just a really bad way to do things, driven by a fundamental flaw in their architecture. And it doesn't just cause problems for Apple. It causes problems for their customers as well. I can't have a separate iCloud account for my work. I have to use a Google account. And more than that, when I hit the maximum number of AirTag devices (which I'm about to reach), I can't add additional iCloud accounts. I'm hard-capped at a single account.
While we're at it, the limitation of a single user per iPad stems from the same defective design process. All of those sorts of 1:1 mapping decisions between accounts, users, and devices need to be fundamentally rethought, because they were always a mistake. Maybe now that Apple is being bitten by it, they'll finally do the things that users have been asking them to do for the last decade. Bonus points if they lose their lawsuit because of a lack of a modicum of care on their part, because that just might be enough to wake the sleeping giant and get them to fix this mess.
I'm fairly sure at least one entire department at MS is tasked with making sure people don't switch to other formats, that despite on-paper "open" XML it remains incompatible and no competitor software can flawlessly read and write it.
So no, unless you can hire a dozen people full-time to counter that, you don't have a chance to break through that.
Qualified immunity is a reasonable concept that I agree is needed for police work.
It's just being completely overdone, used to cover up clear abuse. The basic idea of "when in doubt, police still needs to be able to act" is sound. The actual practice "unless you can prove to criminal standards and beyond, that the police officer knew at that exact moment, that what they were doing was totally definitely illegal and they intentionally decided to break a law. That's quite a bit too much of "err on the side of caution".
What a complete and utter surprise... to the three people who are so high their brain stopped working but miraculously didn't kill them.
For everyone else, this was literally the first thing we thought about, right? Please tell me I'm not the last sane person on planet Earth. Nobody expected that this would NOT be abused in such ways, right?
Those are tradeoffs. I could move from my small city, and out to some of the poor areas near here. Yes, I'd pay less taxes, and probably have a much cheaper house, I'd also have a 40 minute commute, have to drive almost that far for groceries and shopping, and a long ambulance ride because of the remoteness.
That's not what I meant about taxes. What I meant is that in California, your property tax assessment is set at purchase time. If you move to a new house, your new property is assessed at the new purchase price. That tax situation can easily create a five-figures-per-year disincentive towards moving closer to your job when you change jobs. It may not be your employer's problem, but it absolutely affects where people choose to work.
The corollary of that statement is that if employers truly want the best people, they're fundamentally doing themselves a disservice by demanding too much in-person time, because not everyone is that easily mobile. It also tends to discriminate against older workers, who are more likely to own a home, have kids in school, have a working spouse, and have various other things that tie them to their current residence and make commuting harder.
Yes, it's a trade-off, but there's no evidence that it is in employers' best interests to force employees to make that trade-off, and that's the point I was trying to make.
when hiking/walking, i'd rather it stay northbound and click that compass to keep it that way.
otherwise, the pace i'm walking is so slow that the thing keeps changing up what direction it thinks i'm walking in, spins around 3 times, and throws a whole new side trek onto my route.
when i keep it northbound, it still adds that useless side-trek, but at least it isn't spinning all the time.
5000 feet (or even 1000) is deceptively tough when it is in the other direction. (I know the Rescuer knows this but saying it for the general).
Canyons and mountain routes can be deceptively difficult. Examples include the Grand Canyon, obviously, but also, say, starting a hike from a high point along the Blue Ridge Parkway or (in Shenandoah NP) Skyline drive. You head down, not up, a generally easy descent to see the landmark...and then after having been out for 2-3 hours, you have to climb back up. So the hardest part of the hike is when you're already tired...
Park rangers and most guide books will remind guests of this, but not every app (esp not google maps) will.
For biking, google maps for desktop is reasonably well at giving you a chance to see the elevation changes on the route to figure out where the toughest climbs are going to be...but I think it still presumes a steady pace rather than the "I quit, I'm getting off and walking" pace that my unconditioned 50-something legs force me to do.
If companies had to pay for your commuting time instead of just stealing it from you, they'd be way more interested in having as many employees as possible work from elsewhere.
I live 15 minutes from work - Are y'all forced to live 40 miles away from the workplace?
No, you could always either change jobs or sell your house and take a huge property tax hit every year for the rest of your life.
Somehow read an 8.5 mile hike that was actually 14 miles
8.5 miles is close to 14km. I can't see how that could have been a factor but the correlation feels too close to be coincidental.
The signs I've seen photographed in Google Maps (I'm several timezones away and am not about to just go there and check) do not say how long you can expect to take, so maybe nobody felt the need to upload a snapshot of one of those signs. Pretty much every such sign in Austria has that information, I find their estimates a bit pessimistic but that is not a bad thing.
18 miles is just under 29km. I'd feel safe in assuming I could do 20km on a well signposted trail with not too much vertical, although I'd need to do some hikes locally in order to build my endurance up in order to make sure beforehand, and I'd want a "get out of here" option if something went wrong. A 17-year-old has the potential to go further than me at my age, but they do not appear to have prepared this at all. I wonder where they were from, locals should have known better so maybe Vancouver.
I'm more a cyclist than a hiker and have come to the conclusion that Google Maps estimates are mostly for cyclists who are stronger / fitter than me (or have e-bikes) unless there's a following wind. Their estimates do make allowances for hills - take one of their estimates and swap the start and end points, there can be a massive difference if their elevations vary by much.
"Plan to throw one away. You will anyway." - Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"
