wsy

I agree that you cannot easily assess if such a legislation is beneficial for the public or not. That is the case for many government decisions. It still is not a matter of personal opinions/taste, it is a matter of arguments.

So it would be your turn now to argue why this specific law is harmful for the public. (We agree that it is harmful for Apple.)

No, according to my logic, ecosystems should be forced to open up where it is beneficial to the public. This pretty obviously excludes access to ring 0.

Also, it needs to be balanced with the interests of the companies owning the ecosystem.

The law has a provision for this case, but I highly doubt there is a technical reason for not opening NFC on iOS.

It is certainly that simple. You might not like it, because it limits the ability of Apple to exploit their ecosystem for rent-seeking. But it is just opening up an area for competition.

And indeed, why not doing this for other closed ecosystems as well, if this is beneficial for the public?

What Apple is forced to allow now is already practice with Android phones. So we are really not talking about something new and risky, this is well-established technology.

Germany has a pretty good legislation track record, so you can safely assume that technical and financial experts have reviewed that law. It just so happened that Apple was not given an opportunity to lobby for their monopoly on iPhone.

It is a simple matter of competition.

As a customer, if I consider Apple Pay so much more convenient, I'll choose a bank which supports it. So banks are under pressure to either support Apple Pay, or create an equally customer-friendly offer.

If I consider another offer better for me, I will use their App instead of Apple Pay. So Apple can't just enjoy their monopoly, but is under pressure to be the best option for customers.

People who grew up with classical music don't need to jump through that hoop. Or do you require them to acquire a taste for Hip Hop?

If not, then it is exactly as I pointed out before: the bar is much higher if you come from the 'wrong' cultural background.

Of course you can escape, but it is much harder. Love of music style is learned, and you learn it from your immediate social environment.

I recommend to read "Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste" by Pierre Bourdieu.

Amazon has dozens of different models. If the physical stores don't have it, that is an indicator that they are low-volume items, i.e., only few users have this problem at all.

I can see that it is an annoyance (need of USB-C to USB-A adapter), but where is the "major problem"?

I once got the advice that my target group should be the ones deciding if the quality level of my work is good enough, not myself. If they see value in what I do, I'm good. I still will strive to improve further, but there is no reason to stop, as long as people like my work.

Therefore, focus on checking that your regular readers are enjoying what you write, instead of focusing too much on actual or perceived weaknesses.

That is again something the constituency can easily change. It just needs one of the many anti-surveillance voters to be willing to run for office.

If you don't _want_ to get a PhD, it will be very hard to finish. It is already hard if you are motivated and eager to do research.

Also, just the title alone is of not much value in industry, you need to have done research in a sought-after area. So if you mainly want to do it for career purposes, interactive theorem proving is probably not a good choice. If you think you need a PhD to get interesting industry jobs, better look for a PhD in an area where FAANG researchers publish.

I agree with your last point: church institutions are privileged in that some jobs in these institutions are exempt from some labor laws.

Since a recent court decision, this exemption is now quite limited (https://efarbeitsrecht.net/kirchliche-arbeitgeber/, unfortunately only in German).

The essence of successful post mortems is getting the fact collection right, before discussing how to prevent the issue. The grandparent's summary omitted essential facts.

I think that for B2B software, the right approach is "service first!": you should consider service processes as equally important as the business processes your product supports. For each feature, you should ask yourself "How will we provide customer support for it?"

The answer does not need to be "self-service", but don't add customer service as afterthought to your product.

This is correct, but also needs to be put into context. You only pay church tax if you are member of one of the churches eligible to collect taxes via the German state tax system. Non-Members don't pay church taxes. So there is again no subsidy involved (except that churces save administration costs because they can use the public tax collection system for free).

This description is a bit misleading:

- School: Germany mostly has public schools. If you have operated a private school for a few years, you can apply for subsidy. You will receive roughly the amount per pupil that would otherwise be needed to fund the pupil's place at a public school. So this is more or less a zero-sum game for the state. All schools have to obey public school regulations (e.g., on curriculum and exams) regardless who operates them.

- Elderly home: there is no direct subsidy by the state. Germany has established a mandatory insurance ("Pflegeversicherung", nursing care insurance). This insurance will pay for nursing care, regardless who operates the elderly home.

- Hotel: no subsidy by the state at all.

Summarized, there exists no special deal by the state for church operated services, with respect to funding/subsidy.

After consideration, you decided that even though you don't like systemd, using a distro with it is the better deal than all other available options, such as moving to Debian.

It still seems to be the best trade-off for you. You don't use it because you are forced, you use it because you get value from it.

It's unfortunately not true. A large fraction of the UML creators come from the formal specification camp. They always wanted UML to be a specification language, instead of a visual communication tool for developers. Therefore, most of it is way too fine-grained for getting a birds-eye view. For example, you can't have a sequence diagram with components as messages sources and destinations, only with objects.

Of course, you can just ignore the UML semantics and draw something that looks like UML. That might be still useful. However, it then isn't UML anymore.

The citation from Germany's constitution is a bit misleading. In Germany, law enforcement warrants must be signed by a judge (in urgent cases, a prosecutor can sign them, and they have to be confirmed soon afterwards by a judge). There is an exception for communication interception by the intelligence services: those warrants must be confirmed by the G-10 committee which is organized like a court, but directly appointed by parliament. The main differences to the US system are strict separation between law enforcement and intelligence services, and direct oversight of the latter by the parliament.

GDPR wants to ensure that user privacy is protected. If you do that in your business, you don't need to show any cookie popups.

A honest cookie popup would ask "Do you want to be tracked for advertising purposes? yes/no", and any sane person would klick "no". No education needed at all, if the advertisement industry would play honest.

If the Web experience is ruined now, the Web advertisement industry needs to fix it.

That's not how GDPR is designed. In Europe, the business model to 'sell' Web content for the permission to track has now become illegal. Web site owners will need to change their business model, or they will be fined.

Note that you can still 'sell' Web content for forcing your customers to see advertisments. You just aren't allowed anymore to track that on a person-by-person basis.

It is an interesting and inspiring read. However, it turned out to be completely wrong, like many (all?) predictive models of history.

A lot of tools have safety measures which can't be circumvented by their users (e.g., you have to use both hands to start thems). The reason being that some dangers are easily underestimated, even by experienced users. Manufacturers do indeed much better about the inherent risks of their products than users.

If a knive could be built which allows to cut food, and protects you from cutting off your index finger, wouldn't that be great?

It is easy to say this as long as you are not the victim of insults.

The rules of society are always a trade-off.

In this case, the idea is to lose a bit of free speech, and gain less hatred and less murder. That is not an arbitrary judgement; admittedly this is also not a clear-cut judgement.

The system never works itself out, successful societies are the ones which have established governing rules. Game theory has given us pretty good indication that systems rather self-destruct without governance than self-stabilize.

Already the parent didn't make a big effort to argue, it was more like literature ("progress is an illusion"), paired with a very far-fetched conclusion from the second law of thermodynamics. On the latter, a proper counter argument was given.

You didn't argue at all yet, so it is not really a surprise that nobody gives counter-arguments.

Of course you are allowed: you just did it here, and nobody prohibited it.

What you seem to request is that nobody is criticizing your stance. But why would you be entitled to that?