Knowingly.

That should say, "...so your real CC number is NEVER actually used"

1. The ApplePay system is more secure because you have to initiate the payment. Nobody can just walk up and press a payment terminal up to your card.
2. Additionally, the ApplePay system uses a rotating number in the background, so your real CC number is actually used (from what I understand)
3. In my own personal experience, the tap-to-pay system on my card is much less reliable than my phone or watch. I don't know why or how; it used to be better, but then I got a new card and now it's terrible.

I use my card when making large purchases that require a chip-and-pin. I would actually go so far as to say that NFC should be removed from cards because of point 1, and they should only be used for chip-and-pin transactions, while phones take over all tap-to-pay transactions.

I don't understand QR codes on smartphones, but apparently they're popular in other countries because they can be used by even extremely cheap dumbphones.

Microkernel architectures still always involve doing a full context switch when moving between processes. All the registers need to be reloaded, importantly including the entire page table. The page table flush is particularly painful.

Saying fucking asshole things. They're tired of having to pay skilled labour what it's worth, and AI isn't going to actually take the jobs, so they have to make everyone scared by saying things like this and laying off hundreds of people at a time.

Funny how such easy to predict actions aren't being threatened with being replaced. As more than one other person has said here, CEOs are ripe for replacing; nobody would even notice the difference.

Companies like Amazon seem to be betting on the AI taking over theory. It's probably the only explanation that makes sense now, because their reputation among skilled technical people will be permanently damaged by moves like this. It won't suddenly repair itself whenever the pendulum swings back to being an employee's market, if the great AI revolution turns out to be just another hype cycle after all.

Working at a FAANG used to be attractive to a lot of highly skilled technical people and having employment history inside that bubble used to be a positive thing on your resume. I'm not sure how true either of those things is any more. Maybe those who are still there and making premium TC in a big US city are still getting a decent deal out of it. For others, most of those big brands seem to be increasingly unattractive, and having history there seems to be increasingly regarded as neutral or even negative when employers outside that bubble are hiring.

FWIW, I'm a little more optimistic. In the UK, we don't have the kind of pork barrel politics that is endemic to some other western democracies. The ICO are, like many government regulators, under-resourced, but they are basically trying to do a decent job and I think moves like the one we're discussing here today are going in the right direction.

Which is exactly why it's vital for governments and their regulatory bodies to step in and protect the ordinary citizen who isn't an expert on these things from the abuse that the big companies who are will otherwise commit in the name of profit, just as they already do with financial services, caterers, healthcare providers, and so on.

Fantastic. Then we can go back to having dumb devices that just do their jobs and don't have all the other junk attached competing for the market instead. That worked for a few generations before all the 1984 stuff. I'm betting it will work just fine for generations after it too.

And please spare us the rhetoric about how nothing could possibly be affordable if it doesn't violate our privacy to help pay for itself. The difference in pricing in a competitive market is likely to be pretty small. The only reason they can get away with intruding as much as they do right now is that market competition has failed because everyone is lapping up the free money. I, for one, am glad the ICO has other ideas about how things should be .

I mean, it sounds like you have bad neighbours. I live in a townhouse, and my neighbours (co-owners, really) are great. We help each other out. I can ride my bike for a few minutes in any direction and be out on a beautiful trail or out by the lake. Don't get me wrong, I've very deliberately selected a city to live in where access to nature is trivial. That was a priority. But I'd be happy enough to live in an apartment here if I needed to, the only thing that stopped me in the first place is the rules/laws surrounding pet ownership (I had 3 cats at the time, 4 now).

I'm much more in favour of being communally rich. Whole forests and lakes are available to me, not just a yard and a backyard pool or whatever. There are lots of ways to have peace and quiet and beauty, and only a few of them are living out in a field, isolated from everyone else. I'm a pretty introverted person, but when the park is big enough, you don't have to talk to anyone to enjoy it.

I think to be fair, it has both a problem with not enough taxes and bad priorities. Unless one of the priorities you're talking about is corporate welfare and low taxes on the rich. Certainly it is the case that they (and Canada) could raise enough money if they would actually just enforce their tax laws and implement wealth taxes on the ultra-rich.

AIUI, your costs can't (or couldn't) generally be passed on when using the small claims system. Has that changed? It's been a while since I went through the process, so it's possible that my information here is out of date.

There is obviously a personal data angle here. There might also be a defamation angle if the system works as implied by TFS, since it appears that someone's reputation has been affected because someone else lied about them and this has demonstrably caused harm? If there was more than one relevant incident then there might also be a harassment angle.

Please be careful with that advice about requesting compensation in a Letter Before Action, though. There are fairly specific rules for what you can and can't claim under our system and just going in with claiming some arbitrary figure of a few thousand pounds in "compensation" for vague damages is far from guaranteed to get the result you're hoping for. If someone were serious about challenging this kind of behaviour, they might do better to consult with a real lawyer initially to understand what they might realistically achieve and what kinds of costs and risks would be involved.

There is a school of thought which holds that past a certain scale, effective moderation becomes impossible. I've done moderation work and it took tons of judgement.

If your microphone is active, it should at least show an indicator light and a top-row icon, I'm pretty sure.