GNU/Linux was very quick to support the format, followed by Apple, but Windows and Android still don’t support it out of the box.
879 karma · joined September 5, 2019
[1] https://fil-c.org/I think the disparity between the written and spoken language is big enough of a problem to make the language difficult; certainly not less so than extra verb forms or gender in other languages. For example, I don’t find French remarkably more difficult than English, because even though it has both of those features, reading it is fairly straightforward, which makes the language so much more comfortable.
Another part of English that I personally always found challenging (and which still trips me up from time to time) are the verb tenses. Just wrapping my head around them and all the context switching to know which one to use for the past/present/future relative to what I’m talking about right now. Perhaps most people don’t feel as strongly about them, though.
All that said, I consider English among the easier languages to learn, but still quite challenging. Difficulty-wise, one can do far, far better.
(And I still doubt whether the term ‘backdoor’ really makes sense in this context.)
I’m not in any way doubting the success of English as a widespread second language, I just find it unfortunate we haven’t gone with an easy, neutral language instead.
> neutral
> leave hurdles of the various national languages to their native speakers
> (context)
Of all the possible languages in the world, how did my comment make you think of English?
When you say ‘GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying’, that implies to me that it provides secret means of accessing private information to a third party. That is not true, since the party in question is directly involved in the system and there is no expectation of privacy guaranteed via technological means. Calling that ‘a backdoor’ is very misleading.
There is such an expectation for the customer, where it would make sense to speak of a backdoor if there was one, but there isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, and since it’s all libre software, anyone can verify this.
(And I think the exchanges aren’t expected to be run directly by the state, but that’s probably irrelevant to the topic at hand.)
Um… conscious intent? History? Integrity? Attribution?
> It's only plagiarism when people didn't publish their source with this intent.
Yes. And they didn’t. Unless they were public domain (which most libre projects chose not to be), they absolutely didn’t and I can’t begin to imagine how you arrived at your conclusion.
And that backdoor for spying in this entirely free/libre software is…?
Don’t all state currencies ultimately come from banks? This feels much closer to cash in practice, which also comes from banks, yet I’d say it’s compatible with privacy.
Staying disconnected is not what makes them expire, but you need connection to ‘renew’ them before they do expire, if you plan on keeping your tokens for a very long time (say, years). At least that’s my reading of it.
> This is infinitely worse than Bitcoin.
If we only consider this single aspect and ignore all the other ways in which it’s arguably better than Bitcoin, then yes.
My assumption is that this is possible but not supported by default, since there’s no way to guarantee (without using an exchange) that the giver has really deleted the tokens they sent to the receiver, and will not spend them before the receiver can (which would render the receiver’s copy of the tokens unusable).
But assuming someone implements this in software, would it be possible to make direct transfers like this while relying entirely on trust? Or are the tokens somehow tied to the wallet that has first received them?
Moreover, I don’t know in which part of the world you live where private on-line payments are commonplace, but the only cashless payment options I tend to see are with bank transfers, credit or debit cards and payment processors like PayPal. My understanding is that compared to those, Taler gives payers privacy and doesn’t make things any worse for payees than they already are, which makes it an enormous step forward for privacy. Perhaps I’ve missed something, because saying it helps bring about dystopia when it only strives to make things much better than they are right now seems terribly out of touch.