I was referring to the commenter’s second idea that perhaps the Mona Lisa on display today is a copy. Alas, the truth is less interesting.
429 karma · joined July 8, 2015
To change to the Librem 5, I would need to:
- change the way I communicate with all of my friends and family by using SMS over the _only_ method used in much of the world - WhatsApp.
- be excluded from context surrounding many social gatherings due to not being in group chats.
- change the way I travel with very, very different navigation apps that lack turn-by-turn directions.
- stop using social media when on the go - mobile websites often lack many features, if they even exist.
- accept significantly reduced quality photographs of memories, especially in low light.
- meticulously acquire local files for tens of thousands of songs I have organised in Spotify playlists for over a decade, and totally change the way I discover new music.
- lose Shazam and apps like it, so I’ll forever be wondering “what was that song I liked…?”
- entirely change from the mobile-only bank that I use (and, even then, suffer the atrocious UX of most online banking).
- change from the convenience of Apple/Google/etc. photos to setting up Syncthing, my own NAS, and making sure it keeps running and never goes wrong.
- become stranded when public transport stops running at night, as I can’t get an Uber, or try to get a normal taxi at 3am. I’m not even sure they exist where I am.
- carry a wallet, or at the very least my cards, with me for the first time in 9 years.
Unfortunately, the duopoly is well-entrenched, especially for those born after 1995 or so and outside the US (SMS is very, very rarely used in much of the rest of the world). You could tell people that there are plenty of workarounds - I listed many above - and some sacrifices to use a Linux phone, they should try it! But then they would ask “why?” and you’d be hard-pressed to give any reason they care about.
It’s actually rather frustrating for me as I used to export and keep the GPS logs, for geotagging photos from a camera, which will need to be done per day now. Nonetheless, a smart move as they simply won’t hold this information anymore - even for those who opt-in to the feature.
You raise a good point - if the system is so safe, the people who make such claims should accept some liability - but those are not the same people as the ones who sometimes intervene in the driving.
See the problem? :)
As an example, location data is shared with Apple, but it’s associated with a random unique identifier rather than your account. When your trip ends, your device switches to a new identifier. Traffic information is only shared if a certain threshold of users travel on a route [1].
Other examples include the entirely on-device photo scanning, the same rotating identifier system for transcripts of Siri interactions, etc. and, of course, being the only major cloud provider to offer E2EE on everything.
Not perfect, but a huge difference from their competitors.
[1] https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Location_Services_White_P...
i.e. no GPX files
The amendment was proposed by a politician who seems to believe in it genuinely. Furthermore, there is a genuine gap in the law. There’s a case to be made that the law is necessary for even an extremely small number of cases.
On the other hand, the governing party is on the verge of losing power and has made a LOT of moves to inflame a “culture war” to attract right-wing votes. Among attacks on minorities, immigration, homelessness, etc., this has included a “culture war on green policies”[1]. The latter has included reducing investment in cycling and walking infrastructure and opposition to safety improvements on residential roads (such as lower speed limits) if they inconvenience drivers.
The prime minister has claimed there is a “war on motorists” - in reference to local government policies to reduce air pollution, lower residential speed limits, improve bus lanes, and reduce people’s distance to businesses to promote walking over driving - and vowed to stop or limit the above[2]. Whilst there are two sides to all these policies (largely economic and cost-of-living arguments against), public statements often use emotive language to foster an “us vs. them” atmosphere.
In that environment, it is easy to see how this amendment may be a happy accident that bolsters their perceived “anti-green” and “pro-motorists” credentials.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/01/uk/britain-rishi-sunak-cl...
“This data is from New Zealand, replacing gas turbines, but many countries will also be replacing fossil fuel generators and have similar numbers.”
Almost everybody this thread mistakenly believes that the lawsuit is strictly about the unlimited lending that has long since been suspended - it is not.
The lawsuit was provoked by the unlimited lending, but takes a two-pronged approach - it attacks both unlimited and 1-to-1 lending.
Many people misunderstand and think it is just about the temporary unlimited lending. It was motivated by that, but went further.
However, most healthcare workers are paid incredibly poorly and the NHS is generally in an extremely poor state, in part due to mismanagement and underfunding by successive governments. Many healthcare workers feel their lives could be made much better at the voting booth, rather than by people clapping at their door and continuing to vote for a party that has a history of (justly or not) battling against even below-inflation pay-rises. As ever, other factors are at play and the issue is almost certainly not as simple as blaming the government. Nonetheless, there is a general feeling that the Conservative-led government policies since 2010 have reduced the standard of living for many, especially healthcare workers.
The UK is poised to have a change in governing party for the first time in 14 years, at least, but the clapping was seen by many at the time as hypocritical of the voting public.
But I’ll add - cloud seeding might prevent heating, but it can’t prevent ocean acidification. Secondly, if one country or organisation came to dominate it, and the world settled into a rhythm of pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and artificially mitigating the heating effects… what happens if the political winds changed direction for even a few years? We’d potentially see centuries of heating in a short timespan.
Just look at Europe’s reliance on the US (through NATO) for protection and the efforts to become more independent now that a Trump presidency has opened their eyes to the risk that carries. Further fossil fuel burning would mean more and more geoengineering each year, putting control in the hands of fewer and fewer nations. One benefit of most suggested geoengineering efforts is that the particulates fall after a few years. If we came to depend on it (we shouldn’t!), that constant maintenance should terrify us.
It’s an imperfect, short-term solution that could sentence future generations to horrific consequences.
In an ideal world, we would reach net zero in time to prevent that. This is the only long-term solution. But what if, in a decade or two, every projection says we won’t? Are we to chastise the rest of humanity, say “you could have prevented this the proper way!”, and let the dominos begin to fall?
Geoengineering, if the science is proven, should only act as a last resort to prevent such a domino effect. It would symbolise a profound failure of our species. But surely, if we realise we failed, this risky Hail Mary is better than not acting?
The risks of another massive human intervention into the atmosphere are obvious. Furthermore, geoengineering risks giving many nations an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels. Nobody has the right answers yet and everybody sensible agrees we need to do everything we can to reach net zero first.
But what if we don’t?
“You have a defence if you can convince the court that you drank the alcohol in question after you had driven and that you were not over the limit whilst you were driving.”[1]
With that said, your BAC can be estimated from whatever you prove you drank after the accident, which would reveal a discrepancy. Not a reliable way to get away with a terrible crime.
[1] https://www.pattersonlaw.co.uk/faqs/drink-driving-leaving-sc...
Not to mention, nobody wants to clean up a mangled animal from their garden, or spend hours getting it to a vet or rescue centre.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or medical physicist, I’m just fortunate enough to briefly use a machine intended for this purpose in separate nuclear physics studies. I believe BNCT has been done before with reactor sources of neutrons, but for some reason not as a standard treatment and there’s only one left in Taiwan for this purpose. The new development, afaik, is the ability to use accelerator neutron sources for this. Would love it if anybody knows more!
Furthermore, the UK has a long history of such “strict oversight and transparency” hardly existing, when it comes to these matters, with numerous controversies with police and other agencies abusing their access to systems.
It is worth noting, however, that WhatsApp messages can generally be accessed with such a backdoor anyway. The majority of users backup their messages to iCloud or Google Drive, encrypted, with WhatsApp holding the key. Consumer tools already exist that can access these encrypted backups, and fetch the key from WhatsApp with nothing but a text message. A warrant to Google/Apple for the backup is all that is needed, apart from the small % of users who have enabled the new E2EE backups.
Note: I mean in mobile apps, not browsers.