Ardyvee

I got tired of Microsoft. I had seen that Linux was now good enough for what I wanted to so, so I decided to jump ship.

It wasn't a quick decision. I only transitioned from Windows because I finally got around upgrading the PC.

So far? I mean, there was the kerfuffle with the AUR recently. And I still haven't figured out a few issues here and there. But damn it just works and there is no worrying about updating or not updating or anything like it.

It has to do with the stroke you make as you write. In all three ways that I know how to write by hand (full cursive, my actual current style, and print), crossing the ts and dotting the is is just the last stroke(s) of writing the word. The word is not complete until those are done, just like an A (if you write it as a ball with a tail) is not complete without its tail, and sword is not complete without a d at the end.

You keep track on your head the same way you keep track in your head that a word is not finished up until you have written all the letters in it. My first language uses accents, and it is the same process. And yes, you can forget, not just for longer words. Teachers would certainly mark it on homework and tests. I struggled with accents, in general, but just like learning how to spell a word, you just practice it when you get it wrong until you get it right and it becomes muscle memory for how you write that word.

My signature doesn't, however, since I have not built enough muscle memory to reproduce it. Yes, it is technically cursive, so that part is easy to get right; but the flourishes that make it a signature instead of just me writing a word like every other kid who learned the same cursive style would aren't muscle memory due to lack of practice.

It really depends. Either a permanent ink pen + something to write with, praying that I can make a record that will outlive me...

A waterproof kindle (or similar ereader) loaded with an offline copy of wikipedia and a solar charger + usb cable might be right up there.

Probably a good knife. A really good backpack, perhaps? A first aid kit instead?

It is challenging to decide, because here is the thing: if I am put in the middle of nowhere, I am going to be a stranger at the mercy of whoever I happen to meet first, or whoever in power happens to hear of me first. So, chances are I, foreigner who does not speak the local language, would not fare rather well. In this one, self-defense tools, such as the knife, and other camping-useable gear (covers, first aid kits, water filtration systems, etc) would be immensely more useful than other options.

If, instead, I was dropped somewhere near somebody sympathetic, or at least not bound to kill me immediately, I might manage (assuming I survive the environmental shock) to become useful enough to not kill. Here, wikipedia would certainly be useful, and at that point I might make enough to resolve the record-keeping aspect by virtue of getting compensated.

In this later case, besides the kindle + solar charger combo, I would bring my DSLR (and it would be a DSLR and not a Mirrorless, or other such cameras). I have a really neat variable travel lens that should be very damn useful for the military (either for a general or for scouts), and it should work with no batteries for seeing.

Under FAQ of the digital euro's page Q9. How private would the digital euro be?, that they want it to be equivalent to cash when it comes to privacy.

The digital euro is designed to be able to function offline in a way that would offer users a cash-like level of privacy, both for sending money to other people and for making payments in shops. When paying offline, only the payer and the payee would know the personal transaction details of the payments made. Anti-money laundering checks would be carried out by the distributing payment service provider (PSP) during the funding and defunding process, just as it is the case with cash withdrawals and deposits today.

In the case of online transactions, the Eurosystem would not identify users making or receiving payments, thereby protecting their personal data, but PSPs would be able to identify users for the purpose of compliance with anti-money laundering rules.

I... am not entirely clear on the technical aspects of it, or if what they said can actually accomplish what they claim. However, it is a factor they are considering, however much you actually trust them aside.

I would be interested in an explainer, for sure, on how they actually accomplish any of this (assuming they deliver).

While I get what you are saying, I'm not entirely sure where else could the people focused on consumer/passenger rights be focused on, considering it was introduced as part of a series of other reforms around this particular form of travel which millions of Europeans use. It isn't like this was a whole procedure brought about just for the seating of kids, either.

I've been slowly setting up my own services locally, and one of the issues I quickly ran into was simple: what's the point of running the uptime monitor in the same machine? Granted, it still serves is purposes, but...

So, if you do find a way to get something going, I think it'd be really cool. My biggest concern would be, though, on how to ensure you don't accidentally build a DDoS network instead. A though issue I have no idea how to solve, but which should be solvable!

I really don't think the article makes a good case for why they are using "withdrawal symptoms" (which clearly evokes drugs) beyond being a nice quote. Could the behavioural issues be, say, kids figuring out what to do (or what they can get away with) now that what they used to do is no longer available? The article certainly doesn't say so.

The other thing is that these are things that are taking years to play out, which suggests to me that there may be more than just cellphones in the classroom. There is certainly a point to be made that if the smartphone is still used at home, you may up in a wash anyway. A reductive scenario I could think of, for example, might be that a student may say they are more attentive, and they may look more attentive, but if they aren't really engaging with because they will just go home and ask an LLM for the answers to the homework.

Experience (see Facebook, in general, and the real name experiment) says that no, your last point does not hold. As it turns out, people are more than happy to be assholes with their names attached, never mind the many others who don't want to make drama and are more than happy to keep hanging out with them.

If you roam around the internet for long enough, in the right public areas, you are bound to find plenty of tales of families choosing to keep hanging out with abusers over the victims, never mind people who are just "being mean on the internet".

People keep saying that they verify your age at the super market and I keep trying to remember the last time that happened to me and I just cannot. Nor, for that matter, at bars or coffee shops (for after lunch chat chilling before returning for the afternoon stint).

It may just be my corner of the European Union being much more lax than others.

I think that with enough community effort, it could.

Some of what I think is missing is just community documentation (manuals, tutorials, troubleshooting pages) that are easy to find and recent. While yes, solutions from 5 to 10 years ago still work, they often don't reflect the full recent reality, never mind the tendency for CLI solutions (which are great, but plenty of people are intimidated by the CLI).

The other thing that I think is missing is polish around things that are just off the beaten path... the kinds of things that not everyone will do, but that most will do at least one of.

I would hope that (given recent situations like the Portuguese/Spain blackout) we keep a baseline set of bands and stations for emergency communications on simple, cheap hardware, so in principle I agree that ditching AM/FM radio entirely is a bad idea. I could see the band allocations narrowing, though. We just don't use it as much anymore. I am sympathetic, but I don't even listen to radio stations in the first place because... well, I can just choose something that suits my tastes instead from the internet?

(In practice, I would rather that we had more resilient mobile infrastructure, as more and more people have phones and can receive SMSs in an emergency; and more people getting into CB due to the possibility for bi-directional communication)

Is there a technical requirement for the 3+ seconds of decoding before sound output? Or is this a matter of simply waiting for buffers to be filled before outputting?

Your points about 1 and 7 really seem like a product issue more than a technology issue. I am not saying they aren't actual issues (because they really seem like they are), but claiming DAB is bad because the products are bad is... weird.

Point 6 is not really the fault of DAB but instead of how the infrastructure is setup. FM transmitters could be source their data from the cloud too, and would be vulnerable to the same things.

The issue with "children" local accounts (assuming they ever remained 100% local anyway) is that for it to be effective, you would have to control who install the OS for it to be effective.

I have been managing my own OS install since I was a teen, so I could have just created an adult account for me. But, okay, you could say that you could just regularly check your child hasn't reinstalled the machine.

Well, see, they could just install a Virtual Machine. There is plenty of Virtual Machine software out there, and then we're back at whoever installs it being responsible for filling in that information. And Virtual Machines are very useful for a bunch of things: from running software not made for your hardware (see Android emulators, WSL), to being safer around dodgy software.

You could counter that by not letting them install things with your permissions... but there are portable versions of software that people make for a bunch of reasons which don't recall an installation. And I am not talking about hypotheticals: back when I was in school people would carry portable versions of games in USB sticks to copy around school machines so they could play video games during IT class.

Never mind that it means that whenever they want to install something, they will poke you about it, and now you're on the hook for reviewing that. Which you should already be doing because you care about what your child does and they don't have the years of experience to not break their OS.

But if you are doing that, why not use proper parental control software that let's you have much finer-grained control over what they can see or not online, along with other controls around how much time they can spend on the machine and a few nicer things?