Wait until we find out that all of tech (ever) has been subsidized by the true-so-far assumption of continued growth, allowing today’s costs to be paid for by tomorrow’s larger market.
I strongly suspect that most of the things we now know to be problematic were also known to be problematic to the ancients, but were thought still to be worth it for their rewards. That’s pretty much where we still are today. Nobody likes breathing pollution, everybody likes modernity.
Can proprietary software (SAP) be truly sovereign, though?
On the one hand, nothing stops SAP from behaving like Oracle for the sake of shareholder value. On the other hand, even SAP could be bought by Blackrock or Peter Thiel, and back to US dependence.
Am I missing something about SAP that precludes these scenarios?
Nothing absolutely precludes malfeasance, but SAP is a European legal entity, answerable ultimately to European law. Microsoft and Oracle also trade in Europe through European legal entities, which are theoretically also bound by European law, but should that law conflict with any US law that binds the parent companies, we would expect the US law to be the stronger influence (likely covertly).
“Fell off the back of a truck” is a euphemism for stolen goods; it’s not so much about quality (indeed warez releases are often stripped of ads/launchers/annoyances, rendering them very high quality).
> … which means that less than 5% of Americans will truly be deciding who's in control of the House
Something about this framing seems to undersell the efforts and influence of the other 95% of voters.
If a soccer match were tied 6-6 and a last minute winner made it 6-7, the final goal scorer may be celebrated as the hero, but in truth the victory was won on the back of six other goals too.
In soccer goals are fungible. Votes are not fungible. Wasted or excess votes in safe districts don't sum to anything at all. Not even to mention the "fractions of a representative" a vote is worth implied by district sizes which can vary by almost 2X in the house or even more dramatically in the electoral college and senate of course.
I don’t think there is a material difference between goals and votes. A vote in a safe district isn’t wasted; it contributes to that district being safe. The difference is the perceived drama of being the final straw alongside all the rest of the load on the camel’s back.
I think that's an oversimplification. Voting does not have the same dynamics as soccer goals. Maybe a better analogy would be that the team is already winning 5-1 and in the last minute someone makes it 5-2. Good job of course, but can't really be said to influence the outcome.
I believe the point is that, since the electoral races are already decided in terms of party, the only decision is whom to nominate. This decision is made in the primaries, by a very small number of voters.
There's a reason why the majority of Americans don't bother voting. It has nothing to do with laziness or apathy. It's because voting does not matter, and never did.
It's like one of those kid steering wheels that lets the little tike pretend he's driving.
The "candidates" are preselected by powers unseen behind the curtain in smoke filled rooms, and the "choices" you are presented with are not actual choices at all.
This is simply untrue. Conservatives have an outsized advantage because of organizing local voting. Most competitive voting areas are decided by thousands of votes, that could easily be decided by non-voters.
Also the majority of Americans do vote.
But items like vote roll purges, not having voting day be a holiday, anti-mail in ballot efforts, general lack of civic education over the years and in the msm have had a much larger effect than simple “indifference “.
iPhone batteries are already replaceable, albeit most people have to pay Apple to do it. Does this count as replaceable under this mandate, or is there an expectation that batteries must be replaceable by end-consumers on their own? Any requirements for what level of skill and tooling end-consumers are expected to have access to, such as specialized screwdrivers and re-waterproofing adhesives?
A portable battery shall be ... removable by the end-user ... with the use of commercially available tools, without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless provided free of charge with the product, proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product.
Any ... person that [markets] products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those products are accompanied with instructions ...
in other words you need to either make it easy and safe with standard tooling or include the tools people need.
Waterproof products are also specifically exempt.
EDIT: the "waterproof" requirement might leave less room for abuse than you'd think. It only extends to
appliances specifically designed to operate primarily in an environment that is regularly subject to splashing water, water streams or water immersion, and that are intended to be washable or rinseable;
under this definition you could argue that an iPhone is not exempt, since it's not designed to operate primarily in water. How this is enforced seems to be mostly up to the various countries.
That seems a bit less clear to me. It seems to hinge on whether the courts believe that an iPhone is specifically designed to operate primarily in a wet environment.
They also have to be intended primarily to be used in very wet environments and washable/rinseable. So unless someone found Atlantis they will have a relatively difficult time using that as an out.
Am I reading this right… they tampered with an archived page and then changed it back? How do we know? Is there another archive site that has before and after proof?
Specifically, they changed a "commenting as: [their alias]" UI element to "commenting as: [name of the blogger they were fighting with]".
Compare (the changed element is near the very bottom of the page; replace the "[dot]" since these URLs seem to trigger spam filters for some commenters):
Although exercise is the only one of those three that anyone can do immediately, right now, for free. There are barriers to obtaining therapy and medication which may be insurmountable for many.
Ah but if we are considering near-infinitesimal probabilities, we should metagame and consider the very low probability that our understanding of cosmology is flawed and light cones aren’t actually a limiting factor on causal contact.
If we allow FTL information exchange, don't we run into the possibility that the FTL accessible universe is infinite, so unique IDs are fundamnetally not possible? Physics doesn't really do much with this because the observable universe is all that 'exists' in a Russel's Teapot sense.
Despite “post scarcity” still being infinitely far away, we have moved towards it. A lot of things still suck, but a lot of things would be miraculous to a time traveller from 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago. Unfortunately, the hedonic treadmill is real at the societal level as well as the individual.
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