I'm not saying this with any certainly, just suggesting that it's a possibility: in the early days of cell phone service, people had to pay a fixed amount for each SMS sent (and, I believe, received as well)--perhaps $.1, or so, per message. Then, a few years later, you could pay for more expensive plans that included a certain number (some variants included baseline plans with a la carte options). Eventually this was abolished, in favor of plans that included unlimited SMS (the proliferation of HS Internet access probably had a lot to do with these changes as well).
However, it is also true that when it comes to commercial accounts, pricing for certain options like SMS may still follow the original scheme--i.e. the telecom may charge a fixed amount per individual message. I'm not saying this is definitely the case, nor that it is reasonable, if it is the case (the contention early on was that SMS were part of some other communication that occurred automatically, so people should never have had to pay anything for this "service," which was periodically ongoing by default). I'm just pointing out that this is how it used to be for private accounts, and i wouldn't be surprised if it was still the case for commercial accounts.
This is quite a surprise. Germany is currently reeling from poor economic conditions including high inflation rates, skyrocketing energy costs, a measure of pessimistic disillusionment vis-a-vis their elected leadership, etc. This is also related to a general sense that businesses are exiting the German market due to burdensome regulations and rising cost of doing business (in large part due to spiraling energy costs). I am no expert, but this announcement stands in stark contrast to said premises--and I can't help but wonder if this move might not be at least in part politically motivated. The facts as they currently stand: Germany considers itself a trading partner with China, but is aware of the rising imbalance in competitiveness (significantly due to phasing out of ICE vehicle manufacturing, where they held a significant lead, and simultaneous phasing in of BEV manufacturing, where China holds significant advantages, both in accrued institutional knowledge and access to requisite raw materials). At the same time, the German leadership coalition has been frustrated by the rising pushback against the Green transformation of the German economy, which they view as non negotiable, but is objectively a non-trivial factor of the economic malaise.
Let's say TSMC does manage to build a fab before 2027 (the year China is expected to complete the modernization of their military and launch their campaign against the island of Formosa's governing body, aka the Taiwanese government). How might such an extravagant outlay of investment funds (which could significantly improve the economic outlook in Germany and take a lot of pressure off the existing government) impact Germany's relationship with China in the crucial near term (the next few years)?
Let's not forget, for decades the CCP worked strategically on bringing about the reverse: isolating the ROC government by engaging in lending practices that sometimes resulted in situations where they could use this leverage to promote a gradual deprivation of the ROC's status as an officially recognized governing body (which has shrunk over the years to a mere 11 or even fewer nations).
Of course it isn't as if Germany's support would significantly affect the CCP's (meaning, Xi Jinping's) plans of Chinese Rejuvenation (wherein bringing Taiwan under heel is a non negotiable component), considering that even the US' increasingly overt support has had no effect on what the CCP has always viewed as an inevitability. Conversely, as the Ukraine debacle has indisputably demonstrated, even indirect support (especially from a Western ally) has a profoundly disruptive effect on the expected development and eventual outcome of any military engagement.
Also, as some may still remember, one of the principal factors that led to China's significant manufacturing modernization was a somewhat similar deal, wherein China "bailed out" a prominent US manufacturer (Boeing?) that was close to bankruptcy, by agreeing to purchase several billion dollars' worth of civilian airplanes, and in return being handed the high precision tooling infrastructure that's indispensable in the manufacture of high tech machinery (because of the military/national security implications, this required political support at the highest levels of government, meaning presidential and bipartisan support). I am suggesting this could be analogous, differing chiefly in the type of benefit that is gained by the other party, as a result. For China, it was high precision tools, while for the 23 million inhabitants of the island of Formosa (who as a group, if not a sovereign nation already dominate the semiconductor industry) it may well be a tactically swift reversal in international standing (something that barely registered at all until very recently, but then rapidly expanded into an all encompassing existential crisis rivaling their defeat at the hands of the Chinese communists, 70 years prior).
I've run into problems repeatedly when it came to DP cables. The issue is always the same: lack of enforcement and no barrier to entry allows for too many entrants, whose motives are up to consumers to discern, wasting time and money in the process. What I originally saw as a benefit of an open standard, as it turned out, was in fact a benefit (for consumers like myself) of the closed/high priced standard—which ended up costing me less, in the process.
Something the original article doesn't mention regarding multi-stream (MST) is that it could be used in situations where a defined standard for a certain resolution/refresh rate didn't even exist, to still make it available. For example, the earliest 4K/60Hz monitors relied on DP 1.4's (or 1.2's? I don't remember) ability to address multiple displays, to send two signals—each to cover one half of the total screen area, i.e. 1920x2160/60Hz, for a combined total of 3840x2160/60Hz—to the same display, which that display then used to internally drive two virtual screens, added seamlessly to create 3840x2160/60Hz. At the time (around 2013 and for a while thereafter), the maximum supported in single stream configuration (or by the existing HDMI standard at the time)_was 3840x2160/30Hz.
You'd think this would be a point in favor of DP—which is certainly what I assumed, at the time. Unfortunately it soon became obvious that because there was no enforcement of DP compatibility—of claiming to support up to a certain version of DP fully, in other words—this meant that most cable manufacturers felt no compunction about lying shamelessly, claiming to support e.g. the 1.2 or 1.4 version at the time (which implied supporting its MST and bandwidth capabilities fully), while doing nothing of the sort.
The lies did not stop there, by the way. If I could, I would here post a photo that I would happily take this very moment of such a DP cable—which didn't come especially cheap at the time, btw., in fact it took three days' worth of effort, a lot of handwringing and plain luck in the end (not to mention wasting money on several dud cables, each claimed to be fully compliant, on top of the additional money required) to finally purchase a cable that actually was compliant—which claimed gold plating as one of its features. Some fine gold that was, with black spots on both sides of the yellowish anodized plug, where the metal had oxidized! Why? Because, as I came to realize, the high barrier to entry created by the high licensing fee of the HDMI group also acts to keep away a bunch of unscrupulous manufacturers, which is purely a benefit to consumers!
In addition, I've never had problems with regular size HDMI plugs—in particular, with removing them. I can't say the same when it comes to DP (especially full sized), which frequently (by design?) have a button that needs to be pushed in to release a lock that holds the plug in place. The problem is, too many times it's very difficult, if not impossible, to push down this button. Worse yet is the ambiguity that this creates: is the button fullly depressed? Is it stuck? Am I getting ready to rip out, or at least damage the underlying hardware, or even just the cable itself? These are thoughts I've had nearly every time while trying to unplug a DP cable, while HDMI (at least the standard size) slides out smoothly, as nothing is put in place to hinder this. In addition, this works well time after time, meaning there is no mechanical fatigue like with mini- and mico-USB.
I can appreciate the idea that DP, when used internally (e.g. in laptops, where any shortcoming would directly reflect on the manufacturer of that laptop), or embedded within another standard, is a great idea, where its low barrier to entry /can be/ (as long as the savings are passed on, that is) a benefit to consumers. However, to claim the same in all applications is simply not supported by the real life outcome of either implementation philosophy.
Although I confess I haven't completely kept up with this development (meaning, what I am about to say may be entirely due to my own lack of relevant knowledge in this case), I have noticed that there are occasional references made to a similar law that was passed in Australia (last year?).
Well, I'm surprised that no one's brought up a similar case that occurred in the EU and which focused primarily on Google's news aggregation service, rather than Meta's.
One significant difference was that the publisher/holding company initiated and won the lawsuit against Google at the national level (see for example this EFF article from 2014: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/12/google-news-shuts-shop... ). From what I vaguely remember about the case, Google's ability to shut down its news service in Spain only (while keeping it running in neighboring countries) was what ultimately allowed it to demonstrate that the news aggregation service had benefitted the publishers rather than costing them revenue, because once they halted their aggregation service in Spain only, Internet traffic to the publications affected was substantially reduced. I assume the lawsuits in Australia and now Canada were initiated on a similar premise, i.e. that Google, et al. Were negatively impacting revenue, rather than bolstering it by referring additional traffic beyond what they would otherwise receive. In other words,
In the European case, what happened next was that publishers, realizing they couldn't win at the national level (actually, they couldn't reasonably win at any level, since their principal claim had already been invalidated at the national level) took it up to the EU level. They still wanted to be paid of course, regardless of the validity of their allegation, so they figured that if they could get a law (or amendment) passed at the EU Commission level, then this would be binding for all member states--and Google's only response would be to shut down their aggregation service completely in the EU, or accept the demand to play for each news article headline/summary that was hosted on their site.
The amendment that was ultimately passed was something quite byzantine as well, since it forbade any exceptions (to prevent Google from only hosting headlines that came from blogs or other, relatively unknown news services that were prepared to "forego" revenue (due to Google reducing their visitor count, as claimed), in return for the privilege of receiving tons of exposure for being hosted on Google's aggregator. The idea was (IIRC) was that there would be a pool of funds that would be disproportionately divided based on the relative portion of total traffic that each site received--which, needless to say, benefitted the big and well known publishers, while hurting the smaller ones (blogs) that didn't receive much money from this pool, but was still forced by law to participate in this scheme.
Which brings me to the final point: if the law that was passed in Canada has anything in common with the EU law (ie to force Google to pay their "fair share"), then the case against Meta/Facebook is a legal extortion racket, sanctioned by the government.
There were numerous articles, legal opinions, etc posted around that time, several by the EFF (again, based on my vague recollection).
Interestingly, race relations were at their peak in 2008. The trends of seeing racism everywhere and reading it into everything, people's personal views (notably, those of minority respondents, many of whom viewed race relations in far more positive terms than they do today), and more importantly the pervasive, institutionalized victim pimping that has spawned a billion dollar industry in recent years—these are all artificial, forced, and came about in the last 15 years.
Yes, race matters a lot to many people. It certainly matters a lot more than it did until 2008—to all "racial" groups, that is—and I can't help but notice that a lot of freshly minted "experts" are, fifteen years later, profiting very, very handsomely from providing "solutions" to a problem that has perversely only grown in proportion with the size of the industry itself.
A very similar event happened to me in the beginning of this year, involving the USPS (rather than the UPS). Actually, it was on the 5th of January, come to think of it. Instead of clicking on the link in the SMS, I visited the page on my computer. The page was obviously made to impersonate the USPS website, except the link led to a tracking page with a populated shipment number.
The domain is/was uspexlocrts.info and at the time, a whois lookup showed that it had been registered just a few hours before I received the SMS on my phone. There was a subsequent modification about a month later.
The whois information is largely redacted, with only the state/province and country field showing up as Beijing, CN.
I ended up submitting all the information via the (authentic) usps customer inquiry interface and basically asked them to deal with it however they saw fit.
A few days later, when I tried visiting the page again, I noticed that the site had been added to Chrome as a potential phishing site (attempting to visit the site first shows the all-red Chrome warning page instead).
Finally, on the 15th of March, I received a response from the USPS:
--
Dear <Customer>,
Thank you for contacting the USPS® Internet Customer Care Center.
"Smishing", a form of phishing, is an unsolicited SMS (text) message. Victims will typically receive a deceptive text message that is intended to lure the recipient into providing their personal or financial information. These scams often attempt to impersonate a government agency, bank, or other company to lend legitimacy to their claims.
Common lures include “your account has been suspended,” “there is suspicious activity on your account”, "there is a problem with your shipping address" and “there is a package waiting for you at the Post Office.”
To report USPS-related smishing:
Please visit the United States Postal Inspection Service ® smishing page at https://www.uspis.gov/news/scam-article/smishing/ for additional information and reporting steps.
If you have any additional questions or concerns, please contact us again.
All Affinity software (AFAIK) these days makes extensive use of 3D graphics hardware. The problems you're experiencing may be due to insufficient systems memory, or perhaps insufficient video memory. The reason I'm suggesting this is because I have a very old Intel CPU in my system (6-core) 5820K and I'm pretty sure some of the CPU pins are bent because I only see 50-75% of the physical memory that's actually inside the system--and even with that, I never experience any of the problems you described. FWIW, I also upgraded my graphics card to an RTX 3090 with 24Gb of VRAM, when they were clearing out their inventories to make room for the 40x0 series at the end of last year--and I did it predominantly because the GTX 980ti I had been using until then "only" came with 6Gb of VRAM, which was reduced to less than 5Gb by Windows' window manager and was responsible for frequent hiccups and crashes involving 3D software.
Affinity was accepting and incorporating so much feedback from users like myself after releasing version 1 of their software suite--which were subsequently added to incremental versions that were free of charge, up to v1.8X IIRC--that I for one was amazed they were actually still able to make a living at all--the software was (is) too high quality to be selling permanent licenses for such a low price. It's also worth mentioning that at least during the first iteration of their range of products, they frequently had substantial sales that allowed you to buy all their software for what seemed like a pittance.
There is not a single person in existence, who would reasonably (or otherwise) insist that China should not have their own domestic, organically developed semiconductor industry.
When you see initiatives such as described in this article (started with Trump, subsequently expanded by Biden), it is in response to the theft of intellectual property which, in the aggregate, likely exceeds a total value in the trillions of USD. This includes a wide range of activities, ranging from dishonest business practices (that refuse equal market access, then make forced intellectual property transfers a condition of every business deal) and gaming the system through a domestic court system that is inherently biased against foreign corporations (and manipulates the system at every level, including such exotic things as preemptive lawsuits whose objective is to prevent intellectual property lawsuits brought against infringers; or allowing IP violations claims to linger in courts for years, until so much time has passed that the object of the violation has been fully monetized), all the way to spear phishing attacks and massive theft of military technologies, valued at hundreds of billions/trillions of dollars and obtained after investing tens/hundreds of thousands of manhours involving SME-related skills and knowledge.
When, as a consequence of all this, Trump and Biden go through said lengths to make some attempt at protecting American IP, it isn't a case of malice, or inherent bad faith targeted at innocents; rather, it is the rational reaction that seeks to protect itself against a bad faith actor, whose participation has been marked by malicious intent since the day it was admitted into the trade organization.
I wanted to say that what you say seems to confirm your claim regarding your past. But the last thing you stated makes me wonder. It's not that I'm calling you a liar; it's just that you seem to gloss over one of the most important aspects of totalitarian systems. The things is, nobody who's actually lived through such an incredibly repressive system for any length of time would say "you can imagine" (speaking to someone who is presumed to never have experienced it themselves), because it is inherently something very very difficult to imagine, as an outsider; and it's not a matter of intelligence, because so much of it amounts to the manipulation of raw instinct and human nature.
If it were any other way, then Maoist "Struggle Sessions" could be completed in hours or days, rather than taking weeks and months--and including stages of change that have to be completed before moving on (and, conversely, the manufactured fear of inadvertent regression in a moment of "temporary insanity" being a significant driver of the process) .
The process ("struggle," meaning a process that is explicitly laborious at each step) of "reeducation"
(brainwashing) is a topic that entire books have been written about. One such book, by Robert Lifton, contains interviews with American soldiers captured in NK and Chinese dissidents who were subjected to brainwashing by the Mao Zedong regime, called "Thought Reform and the Psychology of a Totalism" (the claim that merely addressing this subject at all is "sinophobic" is actually one of the integral steps in the administration of a struggle session; calling someone"racist" or "sexist" in similar circumstances, likewise).
I'll end this comment by reiterating its central tenet: there is a reason they were called struggle sessions, not "moments of insight." It's a process, rather than a realization. If you read 1984, then the description of the events in room 101 give you a l crude understanding of the process, but written by someone who might be deemed a B-/C+ scholar of the subject: having internalized the process in its entirety and having a general understanding of the process (so they could be a facilitator of it, perhaps), but without the full appreciation of the psychological significance of each stage (I.e. insufficient to be an "architect," or someone capable of optimizing a process they themselves do not fully understand). To his credit, Orwell does a not too bad job of explaining the mechanism of brainwashing to a layman audience; but--and especially if you've read the book yourself--there are aspects in it that remain intellectually obtuse, or counterintuitive.
PS: I concede, it is perhaps possible to have lived in a totalitarian system, without ever experiencing a struggle session in person. It's after all a fairly intensive process and therefore mostly reserved for political prisoners. For example, the NKVD in Soviet Russia didn't mass arrest people to subject them to struggle sessions (something written about in detail by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Gulag Archipelago)--it mass arrested people and shipped them off to Siberia.
PPS: I forgot to add, one example of a modern implementation of Struggle Sessions is the so-called "Cancel Culture." Conversely, watch the stages the person being publicly "cancelled" undergo, beginning with refusal and rejection (correct), but then transitioning to admission (incorrect, because they are more often than not not guilty of what they're accused of, they merely want the pain to end and for things to return to normal, which is a normal and sane human desire; where they go wrong is in assuming that once they cave, things will go back to normal; if, by "normal," they mean release, then read what happens after Winston Smith is released) and finally concluding with profound, heartfelt apology, and subsequent loss in their previous standing/authority, since they just admitted to the (mostly fabricated) crimes they were accused of (incorrect, because they were dragged through the mud and admitted to manufactured crimes). Come to think of it, Cancel Culture is actually a pretty optimal form of Struggle Sessions. Mao would be proud, especially after learning where this was taking place.
It's not a matter of "deserve" and "right to." What use is having a site, that places an artificial hurdle for no acceptable reason? What use is having visitors rage-close the tab they opened for one's website, in contempt and disgust?
Websites, for the most part, aren't composed and administered by government agencies, to provide beneficial information or services paid for by taxes (and it is instructive that federal agencies have been section 508 (of the Rehabilitation Act) compliant for decades, precisely because they are taxpayer funded and therefore have an obligation to make information and services accessible).
So why shoot themselves in the foot, from the get-go? It's not my right that you make your site readable to me. But if you want me to be a repeat visitor, then why make it a difficult and frustrating experience for me? Any person who produces such a site has misplaced priorities.
Given how well the porn industry does regardless of the rest of the economy, it would be interesting to see how they would do if a sizeable portion of "users" actually paid for their services.
Enterprising individuals might consider next how the same industry could counterintuitively profit from such legislation, by starting their own VPN service (which would, for example, not suffer from similar dropouts, connection resets, bandwidth related issues, etc. as competing services). I guess it would finally put to rest the question we've all been asking ourselves all along: are people using VPN services primarily to hide their piracy-related activities, or has it been mostly to hide their sexual fetishes?
If you're from the US, then they're the same thing. For the average person (again, from the US), it means an inflation rate more directly coupled to money supply (i.e. the opposite of how it was in the past; some of this is of course already very evident and has been, for about a year and change--modern monetary theory notwithstanding).
It was the Greens who campaigned throughout the 80s and beyond to instill irrational fear in German kids in the 80s, so they would opt for an impulsive solution, instead of a rational one in subsequent decades. It was always the Greens whose very platform stood for ending nuclear power, by any means necessary. The reason why Germany today is so staunchly anti-nuclear is because that's how the Greens ("Die Gruenen") defined itself as a political party in the 80s. In fact, that was a (if not the) principal motivation for its inception. The party may seem more mainstream 30 years later, but around the 80s when they laid all the groundwork for the anti-nuclear stance of present day Germany, they were definitely a party still better known for, and even defined by their more radical members.
That the current generation of voters who supported the shutdown of nuclear power production were substantially "encouraged" to adopt such views by said Greens' actions and politics when they were children and teenagers living in the 80s is incontrovertible fact. So, even if Merkel ended up as the one who executed the will of the people as head of the CDU, that will had nothing to do with CDU policy, and certainly not in the 80s and 90s. That was by definition the policy of the Greens, who also laid the groundwork for the irrational fear that Germans in their 40s and 50s have been cultivating for decades.
Why can i say this with complete certainty? Because I was one of those kids.
They've no more "reproduced" his copyrighted content, than a student studying photography or other art did, when they saw the picture online and made a mental note to imitate aspects of what they thought made the content interesting. That's the cold, hard reality of the situation. At least, that's how I would argue it as the defense lawyer.
People don't seem to be getting quite yet what 'artificial intelligence' intrinsically really means.
Population replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman--meaning, in order for a population's size to remain the same, on average child births have to come out to 2.1 for every woman. All Western countries have been well below replacement level, for many decades at this point.
Taking the example of One brother and one sister, the sister would have to bear 2.1 children, while the brother would have to have 2.1 children with another woman, in order to merely keep the population size level.
The reason for this is obvious: two sets of parents=4 people, the same number as the 2*2.1 children (minus premature deaths, etc.).
Disclaimer: I am unaffiliated with the developer/company/product mentioned below.
When I was still on Windows 10, I used Start10. After...overwriting my Windows 10 image with Windows 11 (I needed WSL2 to operate my Seagate NAS/Linux based software RAID5 after Seagate's own firmware declared that all four physical drives had failed simultaneously--they of course hadn't, what an incredible slap in the face), I upgraded to Start11.
Yes, I agree, in principle it's absurd to pay anything at all to replace a window manager component whose functionality seems to diverge from what I personally consider useful with every iteration of the underlying OS. Nor am I under any illusion that all the crap is no longer wasting system resources, merely because I no longer see it.
I suppose sometimes there is a bit of comfort to be derived from appearances alone, and the developer of Start11 cleverly figured out what I consider a very reasonable price point to attach to said comfort.
However, it is also true that when it comes to commercial accounts, pricing for certain options like SMS may still follow the original scheme--i.e. the telecom may charge a fixed amount per individual message. I'm not saying this is definitely the case, nor that it is reasonable, if it is the case (the contention early on was that SMS were part of some other communication that occurred automatically, so people should never have had to pay anything for this "service," which was periodically ongoing by default). I'm just pointing out that this is how it used to be for private accounts, and i wouldn't be surprised if it was still the case for commercial accounts.