As a counterexample: I use Matrix along with ~30-50 people, on a federated server, and every room is encrypted. After sufficiently stressing to people that they need to save their secure backup key, we've had few problems with encryption usability.
(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is
not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
as they fly overhead.
I'm not sure if it ended up being used this way, but if I recall correctly, when that was being initially implemented, federation was actually a core feature: different agencies / municipalities / etc could have their own servers and control their own data and accounts, but inter-agency conversations and rooms would be well-supported, along with each agency retaining a copy of the rooms on their own servers.
> People will re-flash their printers with an open-source firmware that won't do the checks?
The text of the bill suggests that it would make printers capable of being reflashed with an open source firmware illegal to sell, as the legal requirements for the blocking would include preventing it from being circumvented. The law would also make having a printer sold mail-order into the state illegal entirely. It’s not clear how parts-built machines like Vorons would be handled.
It appears to only cover sales, however. Possession of files for firearm components would be made illegal, but seemingly not a printer without the restrictions.
There is close to zero chance the current Supreme Court would find a law that criminalizes possession of a file describing the making a gun to be constitutional.
I wonder if you can sell the printer shell without the main PCB and just open source the main board design. Manufacture and sale of that board as a distinct entity seems tough to stop. Especially because the board can have non-3D printer use cases which it advertises as the main ones.
The traditional arrangement is not a ‘lateral queue’, however, but, as the article points out, everyone standing and letting the bartender choose the order. And as someone who is read as queer and undesirable in Ireland (as far as I can tell), and read as desirable in London, in my experience that arrangement is very different than a queue.
> But as they can't easily (i.e., without expense) A/B test their strategy
There also isn't really any detriment. At worst, the sniper is making the same bid they would have made otherwise. If the opposing bidders are not purely rational, and have not put in their actual maximum bid, then sniping can deprive them of that opportunity and thus lowers the hammer price.
And bidders are not purely rational, especially when the items are not purely utilitarian. Getting notifications that you have been outbid has an emotional effect, as does having time to think about raising the bid.
In my experience, most purely online auctions, other than eBay, do work that way. Numerous auction houses, for example, including essentially all the major ones, have their auctions online now: when they are hybrid, that involves online live bidding where an online bid will cause the auctioneer in the room to keep the lot open for more bids; when they are "timed" or "online only", times are extended in some way on bids near the deadline. It does, in fact, work much better. There is still an advantage to bidding very late: there is no disadvantage, and it lowers bids in cases of irrational or imperfect opposing bidders. But it limits that process to something that can be done by hand.
eBay really seems to be the only auctioneer using the snipable process it uses.
An alternative to ever extending the deadline is a Dutch auction model, where a bid consists of the maximum price you are willing to pay. It's a bit like integrating the snipping bot in eBay and allowing everyone to use it on fair terms.
For example, suppose the current price is $1 and the current winner is someone who bid $2 as their maximum bid ceiling. If I bid a $3 maximum, then I become the winner at a price of $2.
In this model, there is no need for snipping and those who honestly declare their maximum ceiling from the start are in no disadvantage compared to those who frequently update their bid, nor do they overpay.
This is exactly how eBay bidding works now. Sniping still works because your satisfaction with the outcome of an auction isn’t just determined by “I got the item below my price ceiling” but by _how much_ below my price ceiling I got the item.
Early bids make you commit to matching other bidders’ exploratory bids. You lose out on the (naive) dream of a “great deal”. Sniping (without paid-for bot assistance) is a costless way of not revealing your ceiling until the last moment (and it commits you to actually sticking to your ceiling because there isn’t time to rebid later).
If everyone bid rationally, this wouldn’t matter, but it’s very easy to convince yourself that you can stomach bidding just a little more than your ceiling just to win the item. This cuts two ways: last-minute bids prevent this behavior from others while also stopping it in yourself.
Unless I’m missing something this is exactly how eBay works. You set a max bid and then it auto bids up to that amount so you can’t get sniped unless they bid higher than your max.
Not that this is perfect either, often it means you can push other people’s bids up to their max even though you have no intention of buying the item. I’ve seen it as a seller and felt bad for the buyers
Yes, almost all online auction sites (or even offline absentee bidding) work this way. You set your maximum price and the auction house bids for you. However, in any case, bidding early gives other bidders information on how much you're willing to bid and allows them to nibble their way up to your max. So bidding late is always advantageous, even when you're setting a max bid.
I've never quite understood why people get so upset about sniping on eBay. Anybody can snipe. That's just the best play. Any time I want to bid on something on eBay, I just set my max bid on the sniping tool instead of on eBay, and then forget about it.
Ebay works like this too. But because sniping is still permitted, I like to bid 'uncommon' amounts, like $3.17, so if someone else tried to bid a max of $3.00 even at the last moment, the bid for the few cents more wins.
If it is like my usual experience with European academia, it may be intended to more heavily push use of Microsoft 365 services, which tend to somewhat assume phone availability. I think that usually universities cannot force the use of personal devices for work, so providing mobile phones on request is one way of moving to a more purely Microsoft service infrastructure. It looks like Radboud is a Microsoft shop, so I would not be surprised.
My university, for example, is gradually removing all office phones (already voip) and replacing them with Teams voip as the only phone system for the university, encouraging personal phone use of Teams, but having computer-based use as the option for people who refuse. As they don't provide mobile phones, however, they can't require Microsoft Authenticator, and so at least officially will still give hardware keys on request (and fortunately still allow TOTP, even if they don't advertise it).
There is a movement in Dutch academia to move away from Microsoft/Google services. E.g. SURF (the IT cooperative of Dutch education and research institutions) are extending their NextCloud pilot to all Dutch edu/research instututions:
Yes. Writing a post like this, but for film, would be illustrative of that similarity, but significantly more challenging to represent, especially for color film. I actually don't know the whole process in enough detail to write one, and the visualizations would be difficult, but the processing is there.
You have layers of substrate with silver halides, made sensitive to different frequency ranges with sensitizing dyes, crystallized into silver halide crystals, rather than a regular grid of pixels; you take a photo that is not an image, but a collection of specks of metallic silver. Through a series of chemical reactions, you develop those specks. Differences in chemistry, in temperatures, in agitation, in the film, all affect what for digital images is described as processing. Then in printing, you have a similar process all over again.
If anything, one might argue that the digital process allows a more consistent and quantitative understanding of the actual processing being done. Analog film seems like it involves less processing only because, for most people, the processing was always a black box of sending off the film for development and printing.
Even in emergency situations, the idea that the best outcome for passengers is achieved when they leave everything behind does involve placing trust in the crew and the authorities around the situation. If you're in a situation where that trust is no longer there, ignoring rules and going for a bag can make sense, which is one of the reasons why that trust is important.
I'd prefer not to go into extensive detail, but I was once a passenger involved in a shipwreck where I did not trust the crew or the country we were in, and it was a somewhat similar situation of needing to get off the ship immediately, with the implication that everything should be left behind.
Disregarding that and instead grabbing my small backpack with a satellite phone and cell phone, a GPS system and camera, my passport, a jacket, and similar items was, in hindsight, a very good decision. Without that bag, we would have been in a very sketchy situation, entirely under the control of the crew and shipowner, in a corrupt country where the shipowner was well-connected.
Depending on the situation, it's not necessarily a matter of compensation for expensive possessions. Do you have any means of outside communication that isn't controlled by a group that might not have your best interests in mind? Do you have any alternative (eg, communication, documentation, or means of payment) if they decide to make your treatment dependent on what you are willing to sign, or if they decide to simply abandon you, or worse? Even during the emergency itself: is the emergency equipment that is supposed to be there going to be there? Is it going to be functional? Do you trust the crew to actually help you?
With all that said: going for an overhead bag in an emergency on a plane is ridiculous and dangerous; if something is so critical, it would make more sense to have it in a pocket (to be fully compliant), or at least immediately accessible in a small bag.
I keep the really important stuff in a travel wallet. It's about as high as a letter/A4 piece of paper is wide, it holds some money and passports, and I could throw my cell phone in it. The rest of the stuff can be tossed, but that's going with me.
Keep an eye out for one - the long ones are not easy to find, and the company that made mine is out of business. Example: https://www.leatherology.com/products/zip-around-travel-wall... (no knowledge about the company or the product, just what I found with a quick search).
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