> I live in a major metro with a half a dozen apartments constructed within a block of me
Good chance Starlink (or any satellite-based internet for that matter) probably won't do well for you either tbh. Too many clients in too tight of an area all fighting for such a small slice of bandwidth and birds overhead.
As for what damage you do, it kind of depends on what you're doing. But in the end you're exposing your work machine to patterns and processes outside your normal job duties, potentially exposing it and the data/access it has to additional risks.
It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.
I love phone as a key. It's an optional thing on my car, you can still carry around a physical key fob if that's your jam. But outside of a long road trip I don't normally care to keep a key fob with me. It's just another piece of junk to have to have on me when I'm out and about. It's really nice having one fewer things in my pocket while I'm out and about.
The experience isn't as you list here though. It behaves pretty much exactly the same as a key fob. I just walk up to the car and it's unlocked, I don't need to take my phone out of my pocket or open any apps specifically or press any buttons on the phone.
> Anyone handling PII needs to be trained in HIPAA compliance
Anyone working at a covered entity needs HIPAA training. A random secretary working for some other random company unrelated to healthcare and isn't potentially a covered entity doesn't need it.
I originally took your comment as secretaries in general, but re-reading makes it more clear to me you're specifically talking about secretaries in a healthcare setting. In which case yes, they would be bound to the same HIPAA rules I agree.
When you go really hard with the privacy-enhancing tools, you can potentially just make yourself even more visible. When you're so far outside the normal way a user looks you're making yourself even more unique than if you had normal-ish looking identifiers.
It can take a lot of effort to make yourself truly just blend in and disappear.
Say you've got a game that's specifically designed for 5v5 play. In this game, things become imbalanced and overly chaotic when there's more than that many players, the main game mechanics start to fall apart.
So now let's say you only have private servers. A bunch of 10-seat servers, and each match takes ~30-40 minutes. How does this work in practice? You have servers with like 8 or 9 players sitting around waiting, hoping for someone to join. How long will they sit there waiting? We potentially have hundreds of these partially filled servers waiting for other players to join. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some system that would automatically send people towards your nearly full server? Some kind of...matchmaking system?
How do we ensure somewhat even levels of skill among those players? Some kind of system that tracked past performance against players of other skill levels and could help you find other players around your skill level? Some kind of service to help you find matches, like some kind of...matchmaking service?
Not all games need matchmaking services, I agree. A lot of games do benefit considerably from having matchmaking services.
> I don't want to be forced to accept an anticheat for games.
I don't want to be forced to play with cheaters due to some people's philosophical concepts of what software I should be allowed to run on my computer when there's technology to radically minimize their numbers for the games I'd like to play.
If I want to have a computer that's locked down to be a platform for playing games online with a low likelihood of encountering cheaters shouldn't I have the freedom to be able to choose that?
One can also look at Counterstrike running on Valve's matchmaking which uses userland cheat detection versus Faceit's kernel level anticheats for the exact same game. It's been incredibly rare for me to run into obvious cheaters on Faceit but I'll often run into cheaters in Valve's matchmaking. It's the same game, the same executables.
> I want to preface this with the fact that I’m not a gamer.
So you're prefacing it as someone who has never really dealt with the games you like to play getting totally infested with and nearly unplayable with so many cheaters in practically every lobby.
Its easy to think its something that's not needed if one never spends any time in the space.
Do they stop all cheats? No. Do they make the bar extensively higher to cheat? Absolutely. Even they point this out: "A DMA cheat is a separate FPGA card that sits in a PCIe slot and reads the game’s memory directly over the bus, while a second computer processes what it sees and feeds back aim and wallhacks..." Any random person can go run some executable they found on a forum, what percentage of the playerbase has these FPGA cards and a second computer to properly run these cheats? And even then, more modern systems can even detect these kinds of things.
Are there lots of problems with these anti-cheat platforms? Sure. Are they now often developed with ties to countries many wouldn't want have that deep of access to their computers? Sure. Is kernel-level anti-cheat overall as a concept overreach? Probably not for what a lot of players actively want. Players want systems to ensure everyone is playing on a somewhat equal playing field. Other than the games being rendered in the cloud I don't know any other real way to begin to enforce it.
> I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater
What if it wasn't "the occasional cheater" and instead was "nearly every match of every game you like to play"?
Honest question: is listening to The Chronic evidence you traffic illegal drugs?
If my family members ever go missing I'd hope the cops knock on the doors of everyone relevant to their lives. Neighbors, friends, pastors, teachers/professors, all of them.
I don't think someone should go to jail because they at one point in time in the past hit on an adult daughter who went missing.
I've personally experienced it on at least six different car infotainment systems by four different manufacturers where the stereo will start playing whatever was left on, you turn the volume knob but the whole thing is still loading so it doesn't react for a few seconds.
Even outside of OEM head units, I've owned a few after market head unit stereos where the volume knob was technically a digital input and if the system was lagging hard the volume input could be delayed a good bit.
A number of these systems will have a different volume level for things like phone calls than for the music, but both volume levels are controlled by the knob. It'll also do things like automatically lower the volume level for notifications or have dynamic volume levels based on acceleration. The knob is rarely directly controlling the actual output of the system.
Here's a good question: if you press the volume buttons on the steering wheel controls, does the volume knob on the radio move?
> to make it undesirable to keep money in them long-term
We could just continue to enforce the 20% penalty indefinitely to get rid of the concept of these accounts turning into retirement accounts.
FSAs benefit the upper-middle-class and wealthy more than poor people as well. You'll see quite a bit more savings when your top end tax rate is 35% than 12%. They're also far more likely to be able to plan on setting aside some portion of their incomes into a FSA at enrollment time rather than the bigger effects of the gamble with lower income earners; the outcomes of the risk of overfunding is way more impactful for someone making little money.
The tax benefit helping the wealthy more seems to me to move more towards eliminating the tax advantages of healthcare spending entirely.
> wait until the whole thing is unresponsive due to heat or a bug
Chances are if the whole thing is unresponsive due to heat or a bug the volume knob isn't going to actually change the volume as well. Its not like the knob is the actual pot directly changing the circuitry in the amp these days, its a digital input.
But for a ton of people that amount is extremely variable. Do you plan on getting into a car accident? Do you plan on getting an appendectomy in June when making your elections the November before? Sorry doctor, getting cancer wasn't in the plans for 2026, can we reschedule that to 2027 after my open enrollment?
I hate FSAs. Anyone have a good argument on why we should have them instead of just making HSAs open to everyone regardless of healthcare plan?
> Taking away physical discs from consoles means the worst of both worlds....they are essentially locked to that hardware.
This isn't necessarily true, it really depends on how they go about implementing the sales. The question being, is the sale tied to the hardware or to the account?
I've bought a number of games on the Xbox store over the years. If I were to go buy a new console and log in with my Xbox Live account, I could re-download and play those games. The games aren't permanently associated with any particular piece of hardware, they're associated with the account.
Nintendo's processes have seemed like its tied to the hardware, but since at least the Wii U its technically tied to the account. This may not have been true for the Wii though, but I never really owned the Wii or Wii U. They have sometimes made it difficult to release your account from the old hardware to associate it with new hardware though, sometimes necessitating calling support if you weren't able to disconnect your account from the old hardware.
When transferring accounts to a new Switch 2, my wife's account somehow got locked and it required reaching out to their support for them to unlock it so it could be properly paired to the new hardware. Definitely a frustrating pain on the first day of getting the new console.
The "no longer sell or trade" part is almost always true though. I'm just talking about the game being locked to the hardware.
Good chance Starlink (or any satellite-based internet for that matter) probably won't do well for you either tbh. Too many clients in too tight of an area all fighting for such a small slice of bandwidth and birds overhead.