If everyone has solar panels on their roof, you can still have the central grid and you can still share power from house-to-house, though.
Generally speaking, decentralized solar refers to a centralized grid that is heavily augmented with decentralized solar, not “truly decentralized” solar.
UBI doesn’t give any power to those who own the means of automation, nor does it take power away from laborers. Automation does that. Automation reduces the leverage of the laborer by reducing the capitalist’s reliance on labor.
We have the same leverage regardless of whether we have UBI or not, but the leverage of employers is reduced with UBI. That said, if more people opt not to work thanks to UBI, then the people who choose to work will see their leverage increased.
Having centralized solar doesn’t preclude a homeowner from also installing solar, and decentralized green energy has other advantages over centralized green energy.
less wasteful
Where’s the waste? If you collect more than you use, you can store it or send it back to the grid. If this is an efficiency concern (“you’re collecting less energy than the same amount of paneling would”), then it’s not really relevant as by that same logic, not having solar is “more wasteful” than having it.
The WHO recommended a minimum indoor temp of 18º C (and a max of 24º C) for health purposes (and assuming appropriate clothing) back in 1987 (and they still stand by the lower bound, though the upper is locale dependent - e.g., 21-22º in Boston vs 30º in Thailand), so I’m not surprised that dipping below that is unpleasant.
They aren’t. From a comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ublock_origin/ by u/tehdang:
For people who have stumbled into this thread while googling “ublock vs origin”. Take a look at this link:
"Chris AlJoudi [current owner of uBlock] is under fire on Reddit due to several actions in recent past:
- In a Wikipedia edit for uBlock, Chris removed all credits to Raymond [Hill, original author and owner of uBlock Origin] and added his name without any mention of the original author’s contribution.
- Chris pledged a donation with overblown details on expenses like $25 per week for web hosting.
- The activities of Chris since he took over the project are more business and advertisement oriented than development driven."
So I would recommend that you go with uBlock Origin and not uBlock. I hope this helps!
Edit: Also got this bit of information from here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/32ory7/ublock_is_back_under_a_new_name/
TL;DR:
- gorhill [Raymond Hill] got tired of dozens of “my facebook isnt working plz help” issues.
- he handed the repository to chrismatic [Chris Aljioudi] while maintaining control of the extension in the Chrome webstore (by forking chrismatic’s version back to himself).
- chrismatic promptly added donate buttons and a “made with love by Chris” note.
- gorhill took exception to this and asked chrismatic to change the name so people didn’t confuse uBlock (the original, now called uBlock Origin) and uBlock (chrismatic’s version).
- Google took down gorhill’s extension. Apparently this was because of the naming issue (since technically chrismatic has control of the repo).
- gorhill renamed and rebranded his version of ublock to uBlock Origin.
Is it possible to force a corruption if a disk clone is attempted?
Anything that corrupts a single file would work. You could certainly change your own disk cloning binaries to include such functionality, but if someone were accessing your data directly via their own OS, that wouldn’t be effective. I don’t know of a way to circumvent that last part other than ensuring that the data isn’t left on disk when you’re done. For example, you could use a ramdisk instead of non-volatile storage. You could delete or intentionally corrupt the volume when you unmount it. You could split the file, storing half on your USB flash drive and keeping the other half on your PC. You could XOR the file with contents of another file (e.g., one on your USB flash drive instead of on your PC) and then XOR it again when you need to access it.
What sort of attack are you trying to protect from here?
If the goal is plausible deniability, then it’s worth noting that VeraCrypt volumes aren’t identifiable as distinct from random data. So if you have a valid reason for having a big block of random data on disk, you could say that’s what the file was. Random files are useful because they are not compressible. For example, you could be using those files to test: network/storage media performance or compression/hash/backup&restore/encrypt&decrypt functions. You could be using them to have a repeatable set of random values to use in a program (like using a seed, but without necessarily being limited to using a PRNG to generate the sequence).
If that’s not sufficient, you should look into hidden volumes. The idea is that you take a regular encrypted volume, whose free space, on disk, looks just like random data, you store your hidden volume within the free space. The hidden volume gets its own password. Then, you can mount the volume using the first password and get visibility into a “decoy” set of files or use the second password to view your “hidden” files. Note that when mounting it to view the decoy files, any write operations will have a chance of corrupting the hidden files. However, you can supply both passwords to mount it in a protected mode, allowing you to change the decoy files and avoid corrupting the hidden ones.
Say I go to a furniture store and buy a table. It has a 5 year warranty. 2 years later, it breaks, so I call Ubersoft and ask them to honor the warranty and fix it. If they don’t, then I can file a suit against them, i.e., for breach of contract. I may not even have to file a suit, as there may be government agencies who receive and act on these complaints, like my local consumer protection division.
I’m talking about real things here. Your example is a situation where the US government agrees that a company shouldn’t be permitted to take my money and then renege on their promises. And that’s generally true of most governments.
Supposing an absence of regulations protecting consumers like me, like you’re trying to suggest in your example, then it would be reasonable to assume an absence of laws and regulations protecting the corporation from consumers like me. Absent such laws, a consumer would be free to take matters into their own hands. They could go back to Ubersoft and take a replacement table without their agreement - it wouldn’t be “stealing” because it wouldn’t be illegal. If Ubersoft were closed, the consumer could break in. If Ubersoft security tried to stop them, the consumer could retaliate - damaging Ubersoft’s property, physically attacking the owner / management / employees, etc… Ubersoft could retaliate as well, of course - nothing’s stopping them. And as a corporation, they certainly have more power than a random consumer - but at that point they would need to employ their own security forces rather than relying on the government for them.
Even if we kept laws prohibiting physical violence, the consumer is still regulated by things like copyright and IP protections, e.g., the anti-circumvention portion of the DMCA. Absent such regulations, a consumer whose software was rendered unusable or changed in a way they didn’t like could reverse engineer it, bypass DRM, host their own servers, etc… Given that you didn’t speak against those regulations, I can only infer that you are not opposed to them.
Why do you think we don’t need regulations protecting consumers but that we do need regulations restricting them?
It sounds like you want these files to be encrypted.
Someone already suggested encrypting them with GPG, but maybe you want the files themselves to also be isolated, even while their data is encrypted. In that case, consider an encrypted volume. I assume you’re familiar with LUKS - you can encrypt a partition with a different password and disable auto-mount pretty easily. But if you’d rather use a file-based volume, then check out VeraCrypt - it’s a FOSS-ish [1], cross-platform tool that provides this capability. The official documentation is very Windows-focused - the ArchLinux wiki article is a pretty useful Linux focused alternative.
Normal operation is that you use a file to store the volume, which can be “dynamic” with a max size or can be statically sized (you can also directly encrypt a disk partition, but you could do that with LUKS, too). Then, before you can access the files - read or write - you have to enter the password, supply the encryption key, etc., in order to unlock it.
Someone without the password but with permission to modify the file will be capable of corrupting it (which would prevent you from accessing every protected file), but unless they somehow got access to the password they wouldn’t be able to view or modify the protected files.
The big advantage over LUKS is ease of creating/mounting file-based volumes and portability. If you’re concerned about another user deleting your encrypted volume, then you can easily back it up without decrypting it. You can easily load and access it on other systems, too - there are official, stable apps on Windows and Mac, though you’ll need admin access to run them. On Android and iOS options are a bit more slim - EDS on Android and Disk Decipher on iOS. If you’re copying a volume to a Linux system without VeraCrypt installed, you’ll likely still be able to mount it, as dm-crypt has support for VeraCrypt volumes.
c. Phrase "Based on TrueCrypt, freely available at http://www.truecrypt.org/" must be displayed by Your Product (if technically feasible) and contained in its documentation.”Would you appreciate it more if I told you that the bar in question is a gay bar?
(Clarification: It’s not.)
“Supposed to” according to what?
If you’re in the US, Federal labor laws explicitly allow “meal periods” to not be paid, though short breaks must be paid. Neither is required to be offered to employees, though.
Source: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/workhours/breaks
State laws differ, of course, and many states - e.g., California - have much more employee-friendly laws. However, even in CA, a meal period must be offered but isn’t required to be paid (unless it’s an on-duty meal break).
it’s still not a profitable venture
Source? My understanding is that Google doesn’t publish Youtube’s expenses directly but that Youtube has been responsible for 10% of Google’s revenue for the past few years (on the order of $31.5 Billion in 2023) and that it’s more likely than not profitable when looked at in isolation.
From the comments on the link someone else posted, it appears there is already a CA government-provided option:
If you are located in the US states California, Oregon, and Washington, see the MyShake app. This app is part of the USGS MyShake project.
The fact remains, that Steam is preventing games from being listed for less on Epic.
For that fact to “remain,” it would need to have been established in the first place. At best it’s been alleged.
One option I haven’t seen yet: You can set up a local file share on Windows or Linux and connect to it via the Files app.
Tons of laptops with top notch specs for 1/2 the price of a M1/2 out there
The 13” M1 MacBook Air is $700 new from Best Buy. Better specced versions are available for $600 used (buy-it-now) on eBay, but the base specced version is available for $500 or less.
What $300 or less used / $350 new laptops are you recommending here?
ultimately the market is behaving as if the threats are sincere so whether or not Valve would follow through is irrelevent to whether the presence of a policy is an exhibition of monopolistic power
Courts have interpreted the anti-monopoly portion of the Sherman act, which governs antitrust law in the US, to mean that monopoly is only unlawful if the power is used in an unlawful way or if the monopoly was acquired through unlawful means.
The need to see an actual example of a game being delisted for violation of the policy is a weirdly high standard of evidence
As a smoking gun, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for something like that.
If it’s a policy Valve denies and the only evidence of it existing is a single reply in a forum somewhere, then yes, I’m skeptical. And given that there are examples of companies that were willing to break explicit, defensible policies, why aren’t there examples of companies who broke these? Unless the plaintiffs bring in multiple witnesses to testify that this was the policy communicated to them or something along those lines, I can’t see the evidence that they did have this policy being more compelling than the fact that there’s a complete lack of evidence that they ever acted on it.
To be clear, I’m not saying Valve needs to have said that was the reason. But it certainly needs to look like that was the reason. If Valve can’t provide a valid reason for the termination, then that’s very compelling, and even if they can, it’ll come down to which is more believable.
Thank you! That document is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. Just realized (after writing most of this comment) that it’s for Wolfire and not Vicki Shotbolt’s case, but the commentary’s still relevant, I think.
There’s enough there that they may have a legitimate case, but there’s also a lot that is, as far as I know, completely acceptable for Valve to do. The specific items you listed, as well as a couple before / after them, are the most promising, IMO, but even so, there are a couple different counter-arguments that I could see Valve making.
The first counter-argument would be that the comments in 204-205 were in the context of publishers who had already received Steam keys for the games in question and did not apply to games where the publisher had not received Steam keys.
The second counter-argument would be that Tom Giardino was not speaking to Valve’s actual policy and/or that he was making empty threats that he didn’t have the power to enforce. Tom’s still with Valve (according to https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/people) so they wouldn’t be able to show that he was fired for giving publishers incorrect information, but it would be feasible for them to have record of him having gotten disciplinary action or something along those lines. Without something like that it’s much less credible stance, but not unbelievable - they’d basically have to be admitting negligence since this is a record of the actions of a representative their company. My gut says they were at least complicit.
200 says Valve “insisted” a publisher change their price on the Discord Store but doesn’t indicate any enforcement action was taken. At first glance, 209 appeared to apply, but it, too, involves the sale of Steam keys. 230 goes into a bit more detail about 209.
I read through the filing and still don’t see any instances of a game being delisted because it was being sold for cheaper elsewhere, when Steam keys weren’t in play. A lack of enforcement action against publishers not using Steam keys who set a different price in another storefront would go a long way toward showing that Valve’s policy was only relevant when the publishers were using Steam keys.
In either case, Valve will need to make the argument that it is not anti-competitive to require publishers to agree to these terms when requesting free Steam keys.
The arguments regarding DLC exclusivity (172-184) are another area where Valve might be found to be anti-competitive. That said, I don’t think exclusive DLCs benefit consumers and I would expect Valve to argue that the intent and impact of requiring DLC be published on their platform is for consumers’ benefit. I think proving something here would be dependent on the pricing angle.
I still think Valve could argue that the intent and impact of their pricing decisions are to the benefit of consumers. The specific enforcement actions brought up were all in relation to the price of Steam keys on third-party storefronts, which I think will be held to a much lower standard than restricting the price of the game on other platforms. After all, the benefits of Steam keys aren’t intrinsic to Steam, and other platforms are free to offer a similar benefit to game publishers.
In 191, the plaintiff shows that a publisher could set the price on a rival platform at 20% less and make more profit than on Steam. However, there aren’t any examples of enforcement actions where the discount on a rival platform did not exceed a 20% difference. Ultimately, if they don’t have at least that - optimally for a game whose publisher didn’t ever receive free Steam keys - the singular statement of one of their representatives might be the only concrete evidence they have. And at that point, the argument that Tom was just making empty threats has a lot more weight.
theoretically they can
Is this a purely theoretical capability or is there actually evidence they have this capability?
it’s already been proven that they can tap into anyone’s phone
Listening into a conversation that you’re intentionally relaying across public infrastructure and gaining access to the phone itself are two very different things.
The use of proprietary software in literally everything
the amount of exploits the NSA has on hand
How many zero-day exploits does the NSA have? How many can be deployed remotely and without a nontrivial action by a user?
what’s stopping the NSA from spying this much?
Scale, capacity, cost, number of employees
—-
I’m not saying we shouldn’t oppose government surveillance. We absolutely should. But like another commenter pointed out, I’m much more concerned with the amount of data that corporations collect and have.
The article also says
The first point is one we’ve heard repeated many times before, but there’s never been any proof on it. Which perhaps the Wolfire lawsuit and this may actually bring to light. An accusation doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right though. Something people get confused on often is Steam Keys, which are completely separate to Steam Store purchases.
Saying “Don’t sell Steam keys off-platform for more than X% less than the game is priced for on Steam” and “Don’t sell your game elsewhere for more than X% less than the game is priced for on Steam“ are very different things. Steam openly does the former; I’ve never heard a reputable report of them doing the latter. The Wolfire lawsuit is explicitly about the former practice, for example.
The press release for this lawsuit reads like it’s about the latter, but I suspect that’s solely for optics. I reviewed the website dedicated to the lawsuit (steamyouoweus.co.uk) and thought they might have some more concrete evidence - nope, nothing. Under the first question in FAQs they have a link to their key documents, but the documents are “coming soon.”
Until they actually substantiate their claim, this lawsuit is just noise.
A redirect isn’t necessary if you control the DNS servers. If you control the DNS servers, you can MITM the website for any visitor because you can prove that you own the domain to a certificate authority and generate a new, trusted HTTPS cert. (Depending on specifics this may or may not foil the anti-phishing capabilities of Passkeys / U2F.)