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Comment Re:Apple will make announcement (Score 1) 21

This is a bit awkward. Everything you are complaining about, you have been able to do on an iphone for a while ....

There have been a camera and flashlight button on the lock screen for years now. So you have never had to click through apps to get to it.
The action button is also redefinable. You can pick if it mutes the phone, starts a recording, opens the camera, etc.
One of the options is to use an iOS shortcut, which is the macro you want...

On a side note, I haven't used the action button once in the year I've had the phone. The 1 or 2 seconds you might save is never enough to try train the new muscle memory to hold the phone differently to press the button.
The lock screen shortcuts, and the swipe up or down actions to recent apps or home .. they are pretty instant, and you get to see what your phone is doing too.

Comment Re:Seems like a lot of money (Score 1) 78

Yes, it's worth it from an EU perspective.
The EU's main goal is better connecting their countries. At the moment parts of Denmark and Sweden are not efficiently connected to mainland Europe. You have to take regional trains or winding motorways in a C shaped route, to get between Copenhagen and Hamburg (for example). They also pass through the center of Denmark's 3rd biggest city. Sweden is worse because they have to traverse through half of Denmark to get to Germany.
I use these motorways in my daily commute. There are roadworks and a lot of rush hour traffic. They are not up to the task of being the main route between Sweden and Germany.
It is the same for the trains. They are not highspeed lines. They carry a lot of regional traffic. There is only space for 1 or 2 international trains a day.

The new tunnel will effectively shortcut the C shape, avoiding a few cities and towns in the process.

Comment Re:the real problem is... (Score 1) 79

You aren't involved in the supply shortage are you?
There are simply no chips to supply, no matter what agreement you thought you secured.
I work for a medium sized company in the robotics field, and our product requires a few thousand bits of electronics to build. Every few weeks we get a call from one of our suppliers saying
"Sorry, we've been supplying you chips for 5+ years, but we have run out. We will send more when we have them in a few months"
Yes, we could try sue or something. But we don't have the budget. It will take years. And it will sour a partnership where neither can fix it.
Our only solution is to try diversity as quickly as possible. But it costs us a lot of R&D money to support more chips. But better that than stopping production.

Comment Re:Needs motion shield (Score 1) 163

The environment is probably too busy to have any sort of motion detection. You will get too many false positives unless you try mount something directional on the flange. And even that will possibly be too bulky.

What should have been done is limit the force the gripper is allowed to apply. This will prevent pretty much all injuries.
After that, you can probably to smarter stuff like measure the actual gripped diameter vs the known piece diameter, to double check you are holding exactly what you think. This can probably be done with 1mm accuracy. So you'd be very unlucky to hold onto a finger

Comment Re:Nobody reads before posting (Score 1) 61

This is facebook you are talking about, so I don't know why you are talking about vague 'people'. They are YOUR FRIENDS. You picked them.

So instead of addressing your friends problematic and childish behaviour, you looked away, and let them continue. Really mature.

My facebook feed is full of interesting people (friends), having interesting conversations. I have no idea why you would want me to delete that.

Comment Re:55% income tax + 25% VAT! (Score 1) 94

As as expat who has been living in Denmark for the last 5 years, here is my take on it:

The Danish system is designed for people to be born, live, and die in the country. Yes, taxes are high, but salaries are good from the time you leave school. So you will easily be able to accumulate enough to live a middling life with your 1 holiday and a year, 1.7 kids, and picket fence. You will then retire and have a good state pension. There will be very little stress in your life, and you will be happy enough.

This might have been seen as boring a few years ago, but compared to the craziness in other countries, I think a lot of people would now love this security.

The system is also not aimed at migrants. If you arrive in the country in say your 30s with zero money, it will take you a long time to accumulate enough money to join the normal flow. Salaries increase very little year on year, so you won't be earning much more than a graduate. Cars are expensive (double the cost compared to Germany, an hour from me), and labour is also expensive (was once quoted 3 weeks salary for getting my garden tidied, and trees pruned). So you need to outlay a lot. You also better stay for life, otherwise you will lose your accumulated pension.

Also, regarding all those 'best country to live in' articles: that is according to Danes. It is voted one of the hardest to integrate into. You will always be an outsider. Not in any mean way, just because Danish social circles are formed through school/university, and change very little. So it is a very isolating life for expats.

But having said all that, the country does function well. Far better than most places in the world now.

Comment I can absolutely believe it (Score 5, Insightful) 91

I think this 'always-connectedness' is going to be the underlying cause of a lot of social problems for the coming generations.

It is a constant grab for your attention. Constant 'fear of missing out'. Constant need to compete on social media.

It is also a constant escape device. I used to be able to pass time on a commute, or standing in a queue .. just content in my own thoughts. Now there is the tickle of 'I could be reading news / scanning FB'.

It means we don't have down time. And our attention span is terrible. We don't remember directions, etc. It means you do not build small everyday social connections with the people around you. You are preferably engaged on your device.

If you have the willpower to resist all of this. Good for you. If you have never been addicted to anything (alcohol, gambling, porn, etc). Good for you. But they are real problems, and this connectedness problem is going to be so much worse for the upcoming generation.

Comment Re:Not only (Score 1) 155

I have been living in Denmark for about 3 years now. Here is my take on the state of things:

Cash is fading away pretty quickly. It was decently in use when I arrived, now it is very much on the fringe. It is being replaced by 2 things
1. Contactless card payments. ALL card readers are contactless. You pay for your groceries/items by just touching your card to the terminal. Type in your pin if the amount is over a certain limit. This limit is pretty high. There is almost to card theft here, so that is not a real concern. I will enter my pin only for my weekly grocery shop.
2. There is an app called MobilePay. EVERYONE has it. It is wired to your bank account. You can send money to people via their phone number. If they are a small business, they have a 5 digit code to send to. It is dead easy to use. Authenticate with fingerprint, type in amount, number, hit send. This is used by all small vendors (flea markets, etc).

I was surprised how easily I slid into a cashless world. When I arrived I used almost only cash. Didn't like leaving a trace of where I shopped, etc.
But the ease of just being able to pay for anything with just a tap of your card or 5 seconds on your phone is just so seductive. No hassle, no big wallet, no scrabbling over change, etc. It might sound petty, but going back to cash seems very clunky.
But it is obviously worrying that every single purchase I have made is known by commerce and possibly government.

But this whole setup does make it awkward for visitors. Especially with the main language not being English. You can get around with cash, but it will feel like you are swimming upstream the whole time.

Comment Asian Market (Score 1) 47

So apart from the hinge and plasticy cover, is this device actually fun or revolutionary to use?
I'm actually quite over all the hype about people trying to break it.
There are a group of users who treat their devices with care and respect. Maybe business users, maybe the Asian market. I am more interested to hear from them how they leverage this device

Comment Re:Talking in film is fad too. (Score 1) 279

3D failed because it was a pain to put on the glasses, and to make sure you had enough for everyone.

A friend had a TV with the active 3D glasses. Some of the movies were amazing. Ant-man especially. The weird lenses and micro sets looked really cool.
The main problem is movies have to cater for cinemas with poor 3D projectors, so the result is just to make everything gloomy.

Comment My mid range 55" LED TV from 2018 (Score 2) 279

So I know my TV is not the most current or most expensive, but here are my opinions anyway

As far as HDR goes, what a pain.
Some 4k blurays look okay. Some look over saturated. Some look dull. I don't know whether my TV cannot handle some uses of the new format, or it is just hard to make an encoding that looks good across lots of devices. The standard should really have been backwards compatible, and devices have the ability to turn it off (my TV doesn't seem to).
The netflix app on my TV has the same problem. Some shows look terrible. Especially the ones in Dolby Vision, which I think Netflix implements badly on top of a poor HDR implementation (I've seen lots of forum threads about this). The netflix picture is better through the app on my PS4 than the native one on my tv.
Speaking of the PS4. The HDR on that looks really good. It is a bit jarring to play an vivid good looking HDR game, then put on Avengers Endgame, which has a muddled weird look.

For 4k/8k, etc.
Is there really a point to 8k for at least the next 2 or 3 years? Or if you have at least a 100" display? On a 55", you can barely tell the difference between 1080p and 4k.

Comment Excellent, and completely necessary (Score 1) 810

I am glad there is finally some progress here.

But am sad how much 'stakeholders decide' and 'best candidate' attitude there is on the site.
If you are a white male, you are the most privileged race/sex combination on the planet. Congratulations. All the advantages are yours. If you don't want to concede even a small amount of this power to others, you are probably a white supremacist.
Also, we are in a real world where the vast majority of the positions of power are controller by white males. This means the best candidate will almost always be another white male. All rungs of the ladder to get to board member status favour you heavily, because they are populated by white males. And even if they weren't, you would probably pick the white make candidate, because you trust your own.

So what are the solutions?
1. You are happy with white males always being in power. In which case, fuck off.
2. You attempt to shift these positions of power to being more representative of your society. Here they are talking about a max 20% change away from all white male. I am sorry this scares you so much. I'm also sure you are ready to gang up and bully the poor woman. Your president does it. Your congressmen do it. Your upcoming supreme court judges do it. So relax.

Comment Re:Has the rasionale changed? (Score 1) 342

This is pretty true in a completely natural environment. But California is not natural anymore, so it has problems like
1. The rate at which you get these fires is much higher. Naturally, it would happen every few years. Now with global warming, accidental fires from humans (cigarettes, etc), and deliberate fires .. it is every few months. So not a healthy pace for the trees
2. You can't really afford to just let a fire run it's course. There are towns and people in the way.
3. There are lots of standard practices to set smaller fires, or to make fire breaks. They all just hopefully lessen the chance of a run-away fire. They are also expensive to do, and risky. I'm also pretty sure the Forestry Dept is underfunded. (ironic that the damage causes is probably a billion times more than their budget) 4. It needs to be a natural forest for fires to be beneficial at all. With different types of trees, in differing ages, the fire is slightly more controllled.

Comment Makework jobs in Africa (Score 1) 365

Having grown up in South Africa where labour is cheap, then having moved to Europe, I was surprised how many jobs were actually just make-work. These are examples, even in day to day living. Retail. Africa, there are loads of shop assistants wandering around to help you. There are 5-10 cashiers in big department stores, with each cashier having a person to pack your bags for you. Europe, there are almost no assistants. There are maybe 2 cashiers, and 1 person watching the self-checkout section. Petrol/gas stations Africa, you have 1-2 attendants per pump. To fill up your tank, and wash your windshield. Europe, all unmanned. Obviously on the industry side it is a lot worse.

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