throwaway494932

They are not. For example, according to Italian Constitution [1], chat control is unconstitutional:

    Art. 15
    Freedom and confidentiality of correspondence and of every other form of
    communication is inviolable.
    Limitations may only be imposed by judicial decision stating the reasons and
    in accordance with the guarantees provided by the law.

note the "EVERY" other form of communication. (Maybe somebody will be able to twist in a way that makes chat control constitutional, or somebody else will argue that since it is an EU law the constitution doesn't matter, but the spirit is clear)

[1] https://www.senato.it/documenti/repository/istituzione/costi...

Until the state itself makes an informed decision on you, based on you religion, political ideas etc, and you are no longer free to make any decision any more, informed or not.

But more than that, even if you had all the information available, it will still be drowned in order of magnitudes higher amounts of counterfeit information, propaganda, lies.

If somebody wonders how those stations and the town surrounding them look like, you can see an example here [1]

[1] https://soranews24.com/2024/12/21/station-of-despair-what-to...

> If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure.

Or, gosh, use bitcoin et al.

It's interesting that when people ask "what's the use case for cryptos?", "being an alternative to Visa and Mastercard" is not often mentioned. That alone is a good enough reason to support it.

Civitai has been recently forced by payment processors to crack down on AI-generated porn. Since then, given that the processors told them that they may want do restrict them even more, they have added ability to use cryptos to pay for their services.

> various forms of crime.

Keep in mind that most of the world doesn't live in a perfectly functioning country with proper rule of law. Being able to use crypto to commit a crime in those countries is a feature. You never know when you will need this feature in your own. (Stupid example: tomorrow Trump wakes up and decide to block all bank accounts of non-citizen until they prove that they are in the US legally: will being able to make crypto transfers be good or bad ?)

But even assuming that all criminal use of crypto is bad, as our money become more digital, we are more and more dependent on a small number of payment processors that get to decide what is good and what is bad, regardless of the legal status (or decide that the legal status that matters is the one of the US, even if you live in Nigeria). This is particularly true for businesses that handle anything sex-related.

For an example of the latter, just a few days ago a payment processor suspended its services to Civitai [1] because it lets people to make ai-generated porn. "The company that had been processing credit card payments for Civitai made the decision to cease processing payments beginning May 23, 2025, due to their discomfort with enabling AI-generated explicit content."

[1] https://www.laweekly.com/civitai-ditched-by-credit-card-proc...

That works if meanwhile Google hasn't decided to increase the target api level requirements [1]. In that case you may not be able to just republish the app, and extensive refactoring may be necessary.

Forcing apps using old sdks out of the app store is probably the main reason they do this.

[1] https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/targe...

People have died because their Tesla had electric doors and they couldn't open them after an accident [1]

[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/four-die-trapped-burning-tesla

Once Canada is annexed, the fun (insurgency) will start.

Former Canadian citizen will be US citizen with the right to buy weapons, AR-15 and grenade launchers included.

Police and out of duty soldiers will be mowed down in random places all over the country. Martial law may be declared. People's freedom of movement will be restricted. Economy will take a bad turn.

Imagine IRA (Ireland), ETA (Spain) or PKK (Turkey) but with legal ability to get a lot of deadly weapons. I don't think Americans are ready for this.

> Greenland leaves the Danish Realm

> Greenland becomes sovereign nation

Greenlanders don't want to become part of the USA afaik, but they know that in the current situation becoming independent means being invaded, sooner or later, by the USA, Russia or China, so I think that the scenario of Greenland trying to become a sovereign nation is less likely now.

As for Canada, although there are a number of Trump supporters that foam at the idea of invading their neighbor, I think that the invasion would be deeply unpopular (a number of people voted for Trump because he was supposed to stop the wars, not start new ones), especially if the Canadian population offer some kind of resistance although who knows, it is just a matter of enough propaganda...

Half of the sons, daughters, and mistresses of Russian leadership and their plutocratic friends enjoy vacationing or living in western Europe, so they will probably replace Putin with somebody else or let Russia lose and run away with their pockets full of money before letting any nuke fly.

The video game Magic Carpet had a couple of 3D modes, anaglyph 3d requiring blue/red classes, and stereogram mode [1]. The latter was not really usable, but it was a cool trick, expecially for the time ('94).

[1] https://youtu.be/iZT-S2F191I?si=8k9jniqA98wgq0Hu&t=1090

Both system have been sent to Ukraine and Ukraine would not mind having more of them, but as I said it is a matter of numbers (2 or 3 SAMP/T systems in Ukraine, out of about 15 totally produced). In the case of SAMP/T, the system is used just by Italy, France and Singapore, and as those countries are not as militarly active as the US, they don't have practical results to show to help with sales, which becomes a self-reinforcing (negative) trend.

Both systems seem to have been successful in Ukraine up to now, and this may help with their sales.

> Tarriffs are a nuisance to the US - the US doesn't export much.

Technology, services, social media... the US export A LOT to Europe. Any iPhone sold in Europe is money that goes to the US, any app sold in Europe is money that goes to the US. Any Ad seen on the web/social in Europe is money that goes to the us...

"Apple recorded sales of over 101 billion U.S. dollars in Europe during FY 2024, reaching an all-time high across the continent. " [1]

If Europe would start tariffs on those, it would be a lot of money.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/349086/apple-net-sales-i...

> The islands are Chinese.

"In June 2008, a TVBS poll found that 68% of the respondents identify themselves as "Taiwanese" while 18% would call themselves "Chinese".[33] In 2015, a poll conducted by the Taiwan Braintrust showed that about 90 percent of the population would identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.[34]" [1]

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

It is also about value types. I think the talk parent is talking about is [this], a bit long but worth watching

[this] https://inside.java/2024/12/16/devoxxbelgium-valhalla/

> The reality is that a lot of code can be licensed from third parties, and there's no moral principle by which it would be right to expose and open-source their code.

This doesn't mean that they would have to expose somebody else's code, they would just have to use something else (or write their own)

> They seem to be fairly unobtrusive, though, and they are labeled as such. For now, at least.

This was one of main selling points of Google Search 20-something years ago. Innocent text-only context-relevant ads on the side of the page. How times have changed...

> and will likely continue to operate from a different location

> The decision to close the markets and offer traders compensation was made by the Corporation's Court of Common Council.

It seems that they want to close the markets, not to move them

Microwaves are great a two things (and little else...): warm up liquids and make popcorn. Neither are properly done by an air fryer.

I have both tools and they have completely different uses.

edit: both sport 7-segment digits though

Isn't this what Family link [1] is for ?

Or you can get an iPhone and use parental controls. My kids has a tablet and I get to decide what can be used and for how long, and nothing gets installed without my approval.

[1] https://families.google/familylink/

You have it the other way around.

Authoritarian is when a sitting president CANNOT be banned, just because he is the presidennt.