hyperman1

If Wero grandfathers in the existing iDeal flow, no cellphone is required. Just a bank card and a small gadget provided by your bank. Belgian Bancontact already works like that since the '80s. I never use my cellphone for payments.

I've heard it is only illegal becausr they signed treaties that would require them to keep it illegal, and they would have to leave these treaties. The USA president at the time hated weed and put it in every treaty he could.

I found a bag full of bricks on a trash sale, for €10. It turned out to contain 90% of a 7745 train, and a lot of other train stuff. The seller rescued it from a container, where a family was cleaning out a deceased's house. They only pulled out 1 of the LEGO bags in the container, on a whim, not wanting to drag more. The seller tought I was an idiot who overpaid. I tought I was lucky to find my childhood dream train.

It happens.

Very well said, and I'd like to extend the idea much further: Old reddit, Windows debloater, youtube adblock, ... There are plenty of services that turned into customer disrespect, but people do huge efforts to keep them a bit less abusive. Huge kudos to these people, but isn't it time to just let the bad businesses die? If the power users are just as unhappy as everyone else, the exoduses start much faster.

I had a tandy of that era, with i think 64K ram. The incompatibilities were big enough that almost nothing could run.

I'd say: Shortages after the world wars, combined with the teething problems of new technology made customers acutely aware and capable of repairability. That lesson is now forgotten.

It also wasn't universally true. E.g. the story of Mad Munz creating TVs that worked only for 90% of the customers (who had good enough reception and needed less signal cleanup). His idea was to capture 90% of the market with a cheaper product, while shafting 10% of the consumers and shamelessly send them to other vendors when they reported their troubles and he already had their money.

https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/madman-mun...

80186 Was not IBM PC compatible. It had e.g. a PIC, DMA and timer built-in, and these were incompatible with the chips in a 8086 based IBM PC.

There were a few new instructions, too, mostly closing holes. You could left or right shift with a constant, while the 8086 had only 1 or the CX register. I think mul also gained a constant.

The fact that Intel released a CPU that could not be put in a PC probably indicates how low they estimated the survivability of the PC.

We had an apartment building complex where the inhabitants were fighting the owners over the elevators. The owners claimed the elevators did not always break down. The inhabitants challenged them for a game: go from bottom to top and step out once on every floor. Somehow the local press got invited. Of course, one owner and the press guy got stuck for half an hour, the resulting newspaper article had was written by a very pissed off reporter, and the elevator got finally replaced.

I want Tesla top management getting a similar challenge: Get this broken down tesla off the road. Meanwhile, some first responders do the same to a normal car.

I got an IT consultant looking at our Linux laptops, and his opinion was that the Belgian implementation of the CRA basically made Microsoft security tools obligatory: No other product survives auditors and your company will have to carry the burden of compliance itself. So if we roll that out, and MS now makes Edge the only browser supported, it also becomes obligatory, end users be damned. MS knows how to play legislators very well.

Around here, public toilets have roll holders containing 2 rolls. 2nd is unreachable, but when the 1st is empty, it falls out and 2nd drops in its place. Janitors just fill the 2nd roll if missing.

I am hoping this is normal around the world and nobody throws away slightly used rolls.

A corporation can own another corporation. So if you set up a loop of corporations owning other corporations, and the loop spans multiple countries, you can end up with a corporation ultimately owning itself. I vaguely remember IKEA trying to get this structure.

Cool. Didn't know that. Maybe, after all the intermarriaging of royal lines, we should just call them european royal houses.

The king is already mostly ceremonial. He seems mainly a stabilization factor for the country when both halves get a bout of separatism once more: He is the ultimate person every major politician talks to when nobody wants to talk to each other. The king does have some extra rights, but not too much, and the alternative seems worse.

King Albert 2 didn't want to become king but nobody else with enough capability was available. So it's not just a fun job.

But yes, the discussion to king or not pops up once in a while, and the general response seems to be we got much bigger problems.

It's German, not British. When Belgium was founded, the fear was it would immediately try to join France. So when a French noble was offered the throne, he actually said no, quite a blemish for the young nation. A surplus German noble was crowned, which was palatable to the English as it balanced things out a bit.

Every popular language has a cultural part to it. Java was famous for its enterprisey verbose code, even if nothing in the language requires it. PHP tends the opposite way, writing organically grown underengineered messes, even if the language allows for reasonable code. Cobol has its 10 000 line single program functions.

When you choose a language, you chose to hire the programmers for it. They will have read the same blogs, seen the same examples, made the same architectural choices.

Long term, when you choose node, you get zillions of tiny dependencies.

I'm not a drawing person. I wish I could draw a lot better. I used to try once in a while, and the results were universally bad.

So a few years ago, I took a drawing course, and pushed it as fas as I could. The results were the best I ever did in my life, and not terrible, but still far from good. At this point, I've decided this is as good as things will get, and I should stop spending effort and focus on other things that I am good in.

If I happen to find myself in a situation that requires me to draw, I will make a honest effort. Maybe something will happen that makes me grow. But I have decided that for the forseeable future I am not a drawing person and that's fine.

You have to read the news from someone, and each one has its own bias. State news has a well known failure mode as propaganda. But commercial news turns out to have its own failure mode, where emotion inducing content has bigger gains for lower cost.

The best advice I can give here is to mix different sources. As a Belgian, I have a few local newspapers and the VRT news for Belgium, NOS, BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera, which are all checked at least weekly. Each one has its own blatant biases and blind spots. There are still big missing gaps, e.g. a Chinese and an African perspective. There is clearly Gell Mann Amnesia going on. Even so, I started to look very different to the world.

The reason of copyright has always been to protect the current powers. To promote usefull arts has always been a whitewash. Here's e.g. wikipedia on that topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

  ... works of dissent and criticism could also circulate rapidly. As a consequence, governments established controls over printers ...

"To protect the children, ...."

If this happens without clicking I agree, the software is not covered under any EULA and you're allowed to do whatever you want, right?

Seconded. I talk to my cats, to the software I'm troubleshooting, to my tools, sometimes even to my dishwasher while filling it. Presumably none of them cares, but every reaction is a training, so I want to train in the right direction.

My mom walked into a table and absent mindedly said sorry. Some salesman noticed. She said she talked to everything. He responded: As long as the table doesn't answer, everything is allright.

Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated. The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.

I always wonder if the internet is thesurvivor of the networking cambrian explosion, with a slight roll of the dice making another candidate the winner.

It might be more of a weakened immune system thing. Everyone gets small lightning strikes all the times, but our defences stop it before it gets too bad. So when defences are failing, you see a long string of random unlucky stuff happening .

Same for computer services going down regularly, or sequences of small industrial accidents, or even humans being non-stop unlucky.

As an EUian,I've never given one care about my credit rating. I don't even know if I have one.

They can cause a long drawn out court battle, and abuse your data. Noyb is the real-world example here. Most companies depend on not being sued, and will fold if a regulater sends them notice.

I did read the book, and know enough people who did. Now I may have weird interests, but that describes basically half the inhabitants of this site.

BTW, as non-USAian, I never saw Cosmos and never heard of NDT.

There was a time where Hawking's A brief history of time gave a decent overview of the universe to beginners. Does anyone know how well it holds up today and if anything better exists?

In the EU, anyone can legally get a second hand LTSC license. See e.g.

https://en.windowsnoticias.com/Where-to-get-cheap-and-offici...

I've always wondered if adding your own dots would throw it off

One part of this is how hard it is to translate the impact to now-scientists.

E.g. 2 degrees temperature raise did not sound bad to me, untill someone explained to me this is from ground to space, and the actual raise is double or triple that. Then we looked on a map and found current day Morocco seems close to what my Belgium is expected to become in that scenario. I still am not capable of deciding how realistic this is.

So you made me surf to amocscenarios.org, and even if this thing is reliable, it still is hard to interprete. My winter goes from -5 every decade to -18. I've never had either in my life. What does this even mean? Can my ww2 rebuilt house deal with -5, as it supposedly already did? What to do forcdealing with -18?

And that's the opinion of someone knowing a little bit. Now go to someone who has to managed 10 of life's disasters over his lifetime and explain how bad this really is.

In my corner of the world, credit cards were for buying stuff on the internet and travelling outside the EU. Now the net has evelved enough to accept our normal means of payment. I always feel insecure when using a credit card.