Interesting. One quirk of browsing sites with JS disabled is that the cookie banners rarely show up. Often, they are implemented as scripts loaded from a site like "cookielaw.org".
I've long suspected that these sites default to dropping cookies when my consent is neither asked for nor received, as MS appears to have done here.
It's good to hear that such behavior is probably illegal in the EU.
Same. I tried to switch to iOS about a year ago, but I ended up returning the device after spending over $50 on highly-rated ad/script blockers for Safari, and finding that none of them really worked.
Back on Android, my daily life is blissfully bereft of ads, except when I visit somewhere with live TV. It's a shame, because Apple makes some great pieces of hardware, but I won't be back until they loosen up on controlling the software that I'm able to run on my devices.
It's not feasible to do a real "Lord of the Flies" experiment on purpose; not even the notoriously sociopathic world of reality TV producers could get away with that.
If you have adults watching and ready to spring in at a moment's notice, the kids will limit their behavior to what they think they can get away with.
If you don't, there's a good chance someone will get seriously hurt or killed.
Not surprising that they (or maybe their underwriters) picked the first option.
Might be worth mentioning the name of the conspiracy: the Phoebus Cartel.
It sounds cartoonishly evil, but "cartel" is just an economic term for a market where a small number of participants collude to control supply and pricing. Like OPEC.
IMHO, we should be more aggressive about converting industries which gravitate towards cartels into regulated natural monopolies, like power/water supplies. Some kinds of markets really are more efficient with fewer participants, and we should find ways to encourage that efficiency without letting the lucky winners indefinitely dictate the terms of the market.
Those are the same questions that people ask on SO, although the respondents aren't exclusively men with beards.
OP bemoaned how people on StackOverflow would tell you not to do what you're asking about. Reference material is not the cause of that "weird bearded guy" problem, but it is one possible solution.
We're talking about software developers, not wizards. It's not like you have to offer a dram of blood and draw a pentagram with salt before you approach the ancient grimoires.
When I was young, we didn't have StackOverflow or Google. We had to hike through snow to access the internet at all, uphill both ways!
In those days, we would usually read the manual when we needed to dig past a surface-level understanding of how things work. The manuals are dry and dense, but they're much easier to read with modern niceties like "Ctrl+F".
IMO, this is one of the reasons that people recommend using software with a long track record. If you have a question about some parameter in a systemd service script, and the internet doesn't have a ready made answer, the details are all written down in the manual.
Plenty of modern tools have comprehensive detailed docs like this. Python, Go, even most widely-used JS frameworks. The primary sources are often downranked in search engines because they don't sell ads, but it's a good idea to find and bookmark them when you start working with a new technology. RTFM!
We need to be very careful with brain implants designed to relieve pain, lest we repeat the mistakes which brought us the opioid crisis.
I've seen videos at BCI conferences of deep brain stimulation implants which provide the patient with a "happy button" to relieve chronic pain/anxiety/depression/etc. They seem to work very well in a clinical setting, but the patient reactions make it clear that there will be an enormous potential for recreational use (and abuse).
People might scoff at the petty vandalism, but how many of you over the age of 35 had a scrupulously clean adolescence?
For the under-30 crowd, everything in their post-puberty lives has been carefully recorded in a semi-public ledger, and they know it.
We should expect people to declare their independence as they enter young adulthood, and it's hard to do that without any space to safely screw up. The Facebook generation was aggressively conditioned to conform with their peers through an industrialized record-share-shame pipeline, so it's good to see gen Z pushing in the opposite direction.
The publishers usually can't publish their games' source code, because of various library and middleware dependencies which are not free or open-source.
Same issue with cheap IoT gizmos. Even if the retailers wanted to publish an implementation of their backend servers, they probably bought (rented) much of the functionality from a third party, under a license which forbids redistribution of the third party's IP.
Developers will package browsers in their code as a way to spy on users with fewer restrictions, not because Safari is unusable.
That being said, I returned my first and last iPhone after realizing that Firefox on iOS couldn't run the NoScript extension.
It is frankly shocking that Apple has managed to go this long while blatantly contravening the precedent set by United States v. Microsoft Corp., and I'm glad the EU is finally taking a stand on that front.
I would still rather have a diverse ecosystem of power-tripping moderators than a few unavoidable ones, though. There would probably be more calm tidal pools like the one that dang cultivates here.
The small town was just an example. You could just as easily make a small social network for a band, or a hobby, or anything you could imagine having its own subreddit/discord/etc.
If requiring moderation made it impossible to operate UGC sites at a large scale, wouldn't we expect to see more competitors and choices, albeit at a smaller scale?
For example, a small group of friends could easily run a social media network for a small town of a few 1-10ks. Tens of people would be capable of moderating it, especially once the bad apples are identified and banned.
There would obviously be some disagreement about issues like admission criteria or what it means to be a "bad apple", but your neighbors could start a competitor just as quickly and cheaply, and you would both be legally responsible for the content that you allowed to be published.
Many small blogs operate on a manual approval process for comments, and it works fine on a small scale with a spam filter or two to speed things up. Why shouldn't we expect the same to be true for social media, if the cost of scaling manual moderation couldn't be ignored by unscrupulous parties?
They were barely keeping their heads above water, but the interest payments on their new loans was like tying cinder blocks to their feet.
It amazes me that the world's richest man was able to buy this company with a bunch of borrowed money, and saddle the company with the debt rather than himself. If he actually cared about Twitter's financial health, you have to figure he would have bought it outright. He has the money.
You probably shouldn't finance a vehicle you can afford with current interest rates, and you may not want to give your debit card to a secondhand dealer for processing.
While I do have fond memories of paying less than $10k for a beater, those days may not be coming back. In 10 years, high-end phones and computers could easily fall outside that limit too.
>When Joseph Stout went before Judge Abraham Caruthers, Attorney General John B. McCormick refused to prosecute him. The witch-hunters tried to argue with Judge Caruthers and cited the Statutes of Henry VIII and James I which made witchcraft a felony. The judge shot them down and told them that the statute only applied in England and had no standing in the state of Tennessee.
One of the first lessons that a junior developer learns is:
>My job is not to write code. My job is to solve business problems efficiently, using computers as a medium.
Sounds like data scientists have the same problem. Sometimes, to solve business problems efficiently, you have to step out of your comfort zone and learn to do things that seem ridiculous.
Why just the other day, I had to write a report for humans to read. Using words and pictures! What am I, a technical writer?
I've long suspected that these sites default to dropping cookies when my consent is neither asked for nor received, as MS appears to have done here.
It's good to hear that such behavior is probably illegal in the EU.