quesera

> Commonwealth countries have extraterritorial jurisdiction

No countries have extraterritorial jurisdiction.

Some countries have a lot of influence over the local jurisdiction outside of their own territory.

The UK doesn't have much influence like that.

But if the UK has any minesweepers, I bet this could all be sorted out with a few phone calls.

That'd be great, if your goal was to hemorrhage customers.

> A launcher for a climbing rope or grappling hook. Have you ever tried getting a rope up over a branch on a very tall tree?

You might look into arborist's throw line launchers and line guns. They come in slingshot and pneumatic varieties. With a little (mostly fun) practice, they can be pretty accurate and reach limbs over 100' up.

I've used them to set solar mesh radio repeaters.

Good editing and curation take time. It has to be compensated, or a labor of love.

That would not be a mere project, but a huge commitment. Which would be devalued if the content was not published consistently, regularly, predictably with no vacations, etc.

It would be a truly honorable commitment (I greatly appreciate similar efforts by people elsewhere), but not one to be made lightly.

(Edit: despite the "not a...but a" construction above, this comment is HI only, and not even much of that! :-)

What is the reference to Plan9 here?

!x has been a shell history expansion since at least csh (1978?).

OVH operates three hosting brands:

OVH, SYS (So You Start), and KimSufi. It's a bit confusing!

IIRC they bring the newest hardware into OVH and push it down the line to SYS and KS as it ages.

That's funny as a human, amazing as a developer, and terrifying as a data processor. All at the same time.

I'll bet that pair has stories to tell.

Voting errors and fraud are reversible. Instances of errors are reversed in every election. Instances of fraud are very very rare, but also reversed.

This happens before the winners are certified, and before they're given the ability to drop bombs.

I don't understand your confusion.

In the US, ACH transactions are reversible and trusted throughout the nation. Bitcoin transactions are not, and are not. This seems parallel to me.

If you were the government, and the legal structure gave you an obligation to do X, you would do X.

Your implied comparison of "promotion" vs "monitoring" makes zero sense though.

Fewer people want guns than want to vote.

Consequences of errors with guns are higher than with voting, because elections are audited and mistakes and fraud are found and reversed.

You cannot helpfully audit misuse of guns, after the fact.

Sorry, I was imprecise.

The EU can theoretically sanction entities with establishment inside the EU, for actions outside the EU. I'm not sure if GDPR allows this, but (as a terrible example), I've read of laws to punish foreign travel for underage sex tourism. However entities with no such establishment cannot be punished judicially by the EU because there is no mechanism.

The EU could block network traffic to an offending extraterritorial entity, which might cause them to suffer losses (e.g. advertising volume if nothing else), but the EU cannot fine or arrest the entity or its officers as punishment.

I think we largely agree at the root of things. There's some imprecision in language around words like "apply" and "relevant".

I have only dug this deeply on GDPR because we, as a corporation, want to comply with the most consumer-friendly policies that we are able to. Obligations (e.g. CCPA because we are in the US) are table stakes, but we aim for more. Our lawyers tell me to stop worrying about the GDPR at all, and I am confident that they are correct legally (and financially), but as we all know it is more efficient to design systems that do things properly at the outset (or at least under minimal time pressure), instead of urgently retrofitting later.

Because the data is collected while voting is ongoing, and audited after the fact.

This is how we know how extremely few problems there are, and how we catch the accidents (which are backed out, hence the delay between voting and election certification), and the fraud (which is extremely rare but of course also backed out).

I didn't know those existed, and so I kind of see your point.

The counterpoint is that if your job was to prevent/punish financial crimes that affect consumers, would it make sense to ignore these exchanges?

Heck, if M:TG cards were the medium, and they could be moved across international borders with a few keystrokes, then surely those would be watched too.

I won't argue that it's not privacy-invading for legitimate customers, but if the legal structure allows it, regulators have an obligation to look where the problems are expected to be.

Because 10% of US citizens (legitimate voters) do not have the forms of ID required in these proposed laws, and it can be expensive and time-consuming to get those forms of ID which are not otherwise required for their lives (QED), and they might not do so strictly for voting.

Some people think disenfranchisement is bad. Others see it as useful.

Specifically, PartyB thinks those people with inadequate ID skew toward PartyA voters. This has been the accepted wisdom for decades. So they are incentivized to make it harder for them to vote.

Interestingly though, PartyB might be wrong about the current population. PartyA, and those against disenfranchisement and imaginary crises in general (I count myself in this third group), do not want to blow up centuries of precedent especially if the consequences are likely to be undemocratic and unfair.

I don't understand this position. Cryptocurrency exchanges are the primary legal touch point (fiat offramp) for a lot of criminal activity. Of course they will get attention for AML.

FWIW, there are vanishingly few problems with improper voting in the US, and the extremely unusual occurrences are mostly PartyB voters trying to "counteract" the imaginary PartyA violations.

Anyone who tells you differently is lying or ignorant.

You're not wrong, but there is a huge difference between moving US government regulated currency to (possibly) foreign and (possibly) nefarious actors, and this.

I'd have to dig deeper, but generally "storing" (or maintaining storage) is not "processing" in the local US legal vernacular. Where both apply (PCI DSS, etc), both terms are used.

In my personal (business) case, we literally cannot comply with GDPR and also BSA/AML, FinCen, Reg E, KYC, etc, simultaneously. Our "business requirements" can last 7+ years, and our customers' wishes have no bearing on them.

And while we have no operations in any EU country, we are absolutely not obligated to even consider any EU laws about the data belonging to any of our customers, regardless of their citizenship. That's the primary point I'm making here -- the EU has zero jurisdiction over anything that happens outside the EU, ever, or any entities outside the EU, despite any claims to the contrary (which, according to Wikipedia at least, are not even made).

This is intuitive, but also the very expensive legal opinion of our lawyers, who have offices in the US, EU, and EMEA, for whatever that's worth!

In the general case, and as a customer, I'm fully in support of GDPR and CCPA-like protections. They're a great idea, I think! I'm usually the privacy nut in any discussion.

But compliance is obviously more work/expense than not, and small companies are especially allergic to nonproductive work and expenses. So naturally there's resistance to the suggestion that a foreign law compels them to do more of both.

And of course, if we're talking about the US, we have a very different culture around government and regulation. "As little as possible" (except those that protect my interests) is the preference of the landed gentry, and those who would aspire to same.

Reasonable people will recognize this as absurd, but ... you can't spell "absurd" without U, S, and A.

Yes! I'm sure you know this, but for anyone with similar problems:

You can disable this conversion "feature" in the Excel "Automatic Data Conversions" preference pane.

...and I hope you have better luck getting people in your company to remember this than I have! :)

I get it, but the operative point is not "potentially harder", but "literally impossible" to enforce -- unless the corp has some presence in the EU of course.

FWIW, I just checked Wikipedia to sanity-check my memory of our lawyers' guidance. Important differences from our discussion, if my read is correct:

GDPR does not apply to "EU citizens anywhere in the world", it applies to the personal data of "living persons ... inside the EU" or with data processed there.

(So GDPR would apply to a US citizen who is present in the EU, and/or being a user/customer of a vendor that operates in the EU)

From the "Misconceptions" section[0]:

  > ## Misconceptions
  >
  > GDPR applies to anyone processing personal data of EU citizens anywhere in the world
  >
  > In fact, it applies to non-EU established organizations only where they are processing data of data subjects located in the EU (irrespective of their citizenship) and then only when supplying goods or services to them, or monitoring their behaviour.

(So GDPR would not apply to a EU citizen who is present in the US at the time of "processing", whether that's a service or product sale, etc)

This is important to my company. We are US-based, but have EU citizens as customers. For regulatory reasons, we block customer activity from outside the US, and we are not able to comply with GDPR (but we do have to be aware of CCPA[1] which has some similarities).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac...

I don't think the "rest of the world" does anything consistently! :)

But the pronunciation difference between Indiana ("short I", in-dee-ANN-uh) vs Idaho ("long I", EYE-duh-hoe) isn't necessarily meaningful.

The letter I just has multiple common pronunciations in English, which I'm told is confusing for learners!

I agree that ignorance is the most likely explanation.

But it's not like these folks didn't grow up with "Italy" and "Italian" being on the radio/TV all the time, spoken correctly by newscasters.

So there's a disconnect there, and it's also undeniable that there was an anti-Italian sentiment in the then-previous waves of naturalized immigrants. So I can't say for sure.

It's written that way, perhaps.

But there's no jurisdictional reality that any of country/union A's rights will protect a person while they are present in country/union B.

In the same way that a US citizen does not have legal protection for free speech when present in, e.g. China, Saudi Arabia, or Germany.

Even if the EU got the text incorporated into the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there are famously many countries who are not signatories (and it would require a locally-implemented actual law to support its recognition).

The EU can arrange post facto penalties for violations of their citizens' rights, to be (potentially) administered in the future, when a responsible entity enters EU jurisdiction, but absolutely not before then without cooperation by treaty with the nation where these foreign-and-not-real "rights" were violated. Which would be a surrender of sovereignty and basically unimaginable.

(No comment on the goodness or successfulness of the GDPR here, just that no part of it is relevant outside of the EU regardless of how the text is composed.)

(And this is all written with awareness that the US somehow manages to selectively enforce their laws extra-jurisdictionally in weak foreign nations. The EU is not the US, and the US is not weak.)

Yes, I think you're right. The middle ground, which I'll phoneticize as "uh-RON" or even "uh-RAN" is what I hear in most places.

The effete "ih-RAHN" is the voice that you mentioned might get side-eyes. This is the closest to how Iranians that I know pronounce it, except that we don't have a phoneme quite like their R, which to my ears sounds like a D, L, and R all smashed together.

But these side-eyes are mostly fair, I think. It's like Americans prounouncing France as "Frawhce", or Paris as "Pahdee". Ostentatious and pretentious, for an English-speaker.

And Lindsey's provocative "EYE-ran" is very present in some locations, I think because GHWB and GWB's affected pronunciations were pounded into the American consciousness during Gulf Wars 1 and 2. Although Reagan did it too, IIRC, and I'm not sure about Clinton.

I didn't think of it in time to update my previous comment, so I'll add another!

Decades ago, I knew people who pronounced "Italian" as eye-TAL-yun. They were usually older, sometimes WW2 veterans. This was in an area of the US that has a large Italian immigrant population, FWIW.

I don't know if it was due to historical disrespect of Mussolini-era Italy, some contemporary xenophobia, or just simple ignorance.

They all pronounced "Italy" in the normal way though.

Well, I've lived in four states in the last 20 years.

Anecdotally, the pronunciation popularity has split neatly along statewide-prominent political lines. For my four example states, three were correct/respectful, and one wrong/disrespectful.

Correct pronunciation has also had an inverse correlation with the rates of active/former military employment, which might be more directly indicative. And a positive correlation with education levels. So the answer is in there somewhere, I suspect.

National TV "news" programming might have a style guide which dictates pandering to the audience by speaking in real american, no matter how well-educated the hosts might be.

There's no reason for Italy and Iran/Iraq to be pronounced similarly. (Cf Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Idaho?)

But FWIW, the EYE-rack thing is because GWB (most prominently, but others before and after) intentionally mispronounced the name of the country, in a "real american" kind of way, and also to annoy SAD-dumb Hussein as a kind of "we're stupid but we're going to kill you anyway" kind of psyop. Or maybe just "we disrespect you in advance of killing you"?

Americans of other political persuasions usually pronounce the names correctly.

This is perhaps the silliest possible response I could imagine to what is intended to be an amusing example and non-illustrative of the more common real-world confusions.

Which are real.

> I guess your teacher gave you that example, but you ABSOLUTELY FAILED to understand the meaning of their lesson.

Wow, you sure are defensive about the notion that communications protocols are most useful when they are consistent and predictable. You may think you've nailed me as an illiterate, but I conclude that you've nailed yourself as a tilter at windmills.

It's just an amusing example, not intended to be illustrative.

Confusion can be real though, and certainly speed of comprehension is enhanced by proper grammar.

> The reason people actually care is only ever to do with in-group signalling or power politics.

This is just silly. If you believe that, you may have some half-baked adolescent agenda that you haven't grown out of. Good luck out there.

It's "ZIP Code™", trademarked by the US Postal Service (this is mostly to prevent others from misusing the name). It is exactly equivalent to a postal code, and most US residents will know both terms, although they will always say "ZIP".

ZIP is an acronym for "Zone Improvement Plan", but no one knows that and it's not meaningful if you do!