Definitely Agree. I will often pause the television to better hear or track down the source of a barely audible sound…and feel like I can’t resume normal activities until I identify it. It really annoys my wife who either doesn’t hear it or just isn’t as audibly observant…and then I’m annoyed at my wife for having no concern about the bizarre out of ordinary unidentified sound that she is content to ignore.
Every pair of boots I’ve owned have needed breaking in before becoming comfortable, and then they remained comfortable for the duration of their life.
My story, and my motives, will probably be different from a lot of accounts posted here.
I started smoking in 1988 and ultimately quit in 2009…so a run of about 21 years, which means I’ve been free from it for 14 years.
My Story: My tobacco of choice was ‘Drum’ and I hand-rolled and smoked without filters. I liked Drum because it tasted great to me, I liked the idea of hand-crafting each and every cigarette I smoked, and it was a pretty cool party-trick to be able to produce perfect hand-rolls out of tobacco or whatever - where ever I was, I was always the designated roller. It was also WAY cheaper than traditional cigarettes - I could buy a can of Drum that would produce 250 cigarettes for $12 - and that was due to a loophole in the state’s cigarette tax. Prior to 2009, the state only heavily taxed cigarettes, but not the individual supplies to make cigarettes (like loose tobacco). That loophole got closed in 2009 and the cost of a can of loose tobacco went up from $12 to $49 over night. I’d known for a while that I should probably quit, but I just never got to that mental acceptance of doing it, until this new tax came along. Ultimately, I decided I just wasn’t going to pay that new tax and so I didn’t really decide to quit smoking, I decided I was going to quit buying tobacco (which has the same end result). At first, I started cutting back, to make my remaining supply of tobacco last as long as possible. The lower my stock got, the farther back I cut down. At first it was limiting myself to 4 a day… then 2 a day (that I would smoke over 4 sessions), then 1 a day that I’d light and inhale a few times and put out and save for later. I stretched this out for months…and then one day it was gone. I didn’t use any medical aids, I didn’t use any substitution with something else. I just quit. I should also mention that I’d also always enjoyed cigars…and typically enjoyed about 6 cigars a year, but I’d decided to cut that out also. Shortly after quitting, I told myself that I’d treat myself to a cigar only after I could go 1-full-month without thinking about smoking. This went on for months, and I actually thought about smoking all the time. At first, several times a day…and then several times a week, and then eventually just once in a while. It actually took about a year after quitting that a friend and I were talking about it (he was quitting also) and I realized I hadn’t thought about smoking for several months. Finally, I seemed to have fully broken both the physical and mental addiction. It was about six months after that that I decided to treat myself to a cigar. These days, I have about 3 cigars a year (all on special occasions) - which is a small enough number not to re-kindle my desire to smoke more.
It’s nice to be escaped from the habit, the financial burden of it, and the negative health aspects. The other great side effects: lower life insurance premiums, whiter teeth (and easier/quicker dental cleanings), clothes that don’t smell like smoke.
That’s the part of the point of the comment you are replying to. The fines are neither a deterrent nor an inconvenience to those wealthy enough to cover the cost. They use their money, power, and influence to continue to violate law without any other consequences other than pulling out their checkbook. The fines are meaningless to people that wealthy.
Anonymous tips are less than worthless.
The first problem is that anyone who is anonymously tipped on is just going to deny it. And now its the word of a named person vs an anonymous tip. That isn’t going to fly.
The next problem is that people will quickly learn to weaponize the anonymous tip process to persecute the people they dislike - regardless of whether the target was even involved in the vandalism.
Policies like these are dumb. They don’t discourage the bad behavior (the opposite, actually, perpetrators know that the damage they do will impact far more people, which is the entire point of doing it in the first place, so this policy actually works as an incentive to do more vandalism).
I don’t think anyone disagrees with that…I just think it’s important to be realistic here. For niche communities to thrive the way they thrive on reddit, it’s just a numbers game. They have the numbers. Lemmy doesn’t. Lemmy is about two orders of magnitude short of the numbers of users needed to achieve the critical-mass / synergy that would be needed to make most niche communities actually viable here. And even then…it’ll probably take even more users than that because the very nature of lemmy is fragmentation/distributed - so having the total numbers still might not be enough.
No, you’re not paranoid. I’d call it diligent.
The premise of the statement you quoted is faulty to the core. A device internal to your home network knows a lot about the design of your home network and it knows a lot about the other devices on your network, and it can be used to facilitate/relay malicious access to your other devices if it becomes compromised.
Wyze has always struggled with security problems…and I’ll admit that I do have several wyze cameras…but long ago decided their security was not trustworthy and created an entirely new virtual lan to run just my IOT stuff from. That, at least, reduces the exposure for some of their security issues. I certainly would never have interior cameras built by wyze - that’s too risky even with robust network security on my side of it.
It lacks the critical mass of users needed to make even moderately niche communities feasible; basic examples are: City communities, State communities, communities based on car make/model - these are types of communities that Reddits excels at having and it’s because of the size of the user base. The only point I’m making with this is that Lemmy is a very long way off from being a viable replacement for Reddit.
Next big problem is: Lemmy has a HORRIBLE new user experience…which I’m sure is significantly responsible for slowing Lemmy adoption. Single biggest issue is content discovery (which is just-ok if you got lucky and joined a super-massive Lemmy instance when you first joined, all the way to an atrocity if you got unlucky and joined a small instance when you first joined.
There’s also a lot of complicated activities needed just to be a functional Lemmy user: like regularly backing up your user/instance preferences (including subscriptions) and replicating those preferences into another account/instance in case something happens to your current account/instance or your instance becomes temporarily or permanently inaccessible. This is asking too much of your common non-technical user, but it’s still currently necessary just because of how often instances have problems. Think about all the user accounts on all the .ml instances that had to be re-created from scratch because there’s no built-in way for users to do it. Users should be able to sync their user accounts similarly to how instances sync their content with each other.
For the record, the first instance I created an account on (when I was a brand new Lemmy user months ago) was a very small instance (but recommended on the very first page of the official join-lemmy.org site), and there just wasn’t functional content discovery at all on that instance. It was a barren wasteland. The fact that servers aren’t even aware of what content is out there on federated systems until some user on that system already happens to know about the content/community and subscribe to it is setting a lot of new users up for failure. Once I realized that it sucks being on a small instances, the second account I created was on Lemmy.world, but that instance suffers from it’s popularity and is the frequent target of DDOS and was going down for me several hours a day. So, there’s also a penalty for joining a big instance. I ultimately had to create numerous accounts on numerous instances and then try to keep the user preferences in sync across multiple accounts on multiple instances so that I can easily swap to a different account when an instance had problems.
Elitist user base: I swear, some lemmy users are worse than the old BSD forums and worse than stack exchange when it comes to taking criticism about the platform. Guaranteed, this comment will get downvoted, and I’ll be mansplained about how content discovery is facilitated through having to have foreknowledge about some 3rd party websites that keep track of communities (which don’t always work because not all instances can be indexed yet do to a laundry list of other problems), and what an idiot I am for not knowing this, etc, etc.
Having to go to this length just to use a reddit alternative - that’s unacceptable to most non-technical users. Lemmy doesn’t stand a chance of gaining momentum until these issues are solved.
Let me install my own third party apps w/o the App store (I know altstore exists, but needing to renew apps every few days is super janky). If I spend my money on a device, I should be allowed to put whatever I want on it, however I want. Let me, the consumer accept the risks of doing so.
This is THE reason I switched from Apple to Android in 2017 and never looked back.
It would also affect already sold units. They are giving apple 2 weeks to come up with a software fix to remediate already sold units and if apple fails to comply, they will force apple to recall all the iPhone 12s still in use.
The article says:
The French agency that regulates radio frequencies, the ANFR, has notified Apple of its decision to ban iPhone 12 sales after tests showed the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) was above the allowed limit.
Followed by this quote:
The ANFR said it would verify that the iPhone 12 models were no longer being offered for sale in France starting today.
That sounds a lot like “banned” to me. Considering those two quotes, I don’t think the article title is misleading. It sounds like they are banning sales effective immediately, and will force apple to conduct a recall if they can’t retroactively fix the already sold units.
From the article:
The agency noted that tests measuring radiation absorption rates at a distance of 5cms (1.98 inches) showed that the iPhone 12 was in compliance with the limit of 2.0 watts per kilogram.
But it also says that:
The ANFR said accredited labs had measured absorption of electromagnetic energy by the body at 5.74 watts per kilogram during tests simulating when the phone was being held in the hand or kept in a pocket, writes France 24. That’s higher than the European standard absorption rate of 4.0 watts per kilogram.
That sounds like different test methodology was used for the test it is currently failing? There is a difference between “from 5 cm” vs “held in hand” or “kept in a pocket”.
It makes it sound like the iPhone 12 was in compliance earlier, but is not in compliance now with different test methodology.
It’s not per kilogram of the device. It’s a measure of absorption per kilogram of body mass of the person using the device.
A good way to think about it is: throw a small piece of meat into the microwave and let it absorb some microwaves. It gets warm. Now imagine a much larger piece of meat. It can absorb a lot more microwaves before it starts getting warm. The smaller the ‘body mass’, the less radiation it can absorb and dissipate before becoming damaged. So when it comes to mobile device radiation levels, they focus on the watts of radiation absorbed per kilogram of body mass.
I thought the iPhone 12 hasn’t been sold since 2021, so why does it even matter if the iPhone 12 is not compliant with a more modern standard?
Headline is a bit misleading. It’s not part of California state law yet. The bill needs to go back to the senate for a procedural vote, then needs to be signed into law by the Governor. It’s probably a foregone conclusion that both those things will happen given the unanimous support for the bill, but I just wanted to point out that it’s technically not a done-deal yet.
iFixit obviously has some vested interest in seeing this pass, but at the end of the day they’ve accomplished something great for the country. I can’t wait to see how this actually impacts consumer products going forward.
TIL, my belief that I have the right to call out bullshit when I see it is considered a religion now.
They must have done a cost/benefit analysis and came to the obvious conclusion that having to build multiple variants would be more costly than the profit they’d have earned by continuing to gouge all the non-EU consumers on proprietary cables and junk.
The world owes the EU a debt of gratitude for forcing apple compliance on this one.
It usually means you reside in a multi-block sized apartment complex and that the dumpsters are on one end of the complex rather than being centrally located, and your apartment is on the other end… and those distances feel doubled if it is raining, or there is snow or ice on the ground.
One big problem is that it makes enforcement of real abuse impossible. If there is an explosion of that kind of ai generated content and it gets good enough to be confused for the real thing, then real abuse will slip under the radar. It would be impossible to sift through all that content trying to differentiate between ai generated and real if ai generated were ever allowed.
Are you just talking about dynamic DNS services for one or a few home servers?
There’s always DynDNS, but that’s a paid service. I actually discovered that dynamic IP address service was provided free by Google when using Google Domains as the registrar, so I moved a few of my private domains over to Google several years ago to save myself $55 a year.
Unfortunately, Google Domains is shutting down and all registrar services and existing customer domains are getting moved to squarespace and I’ve not yet been able to determine if squarespace is going to be offering the free dynamic DNS service or not.