I love having mysterious cables that may or may not do things I expect them to when plugged into ports that may or may not support the features I think they do.
admiralteal
joined 1 year ago
Arguably more stuff is going to be collected and sent to more people if it's turned off. But it will be in a more piecemeal though likely more personally identifiable way. At least that's what Google would definitely argue
I genuinely don't know if the counterfactual is worse than the actual here. Either way bad.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. Speed limits themselves are only very loosely related to safety (85th percentile rule and civil engineering voodoo science) and the speedometer is more about staying on the right side of the police state when confronted with roads that overwhelmingly signal to drivers that they should be going WAY faster than is legal.
And even then those speed limits, at least outside of the comparative safety of highways, are almost always set well higher than what is actually safe for the neighborhood or useful to keep the traffic network freeflowing.
What really gets me about these expensive gadget helmets is that helmets are fundamentally a consumable good. They can only take so many bangs and bumps, so much sweat, so much all that before they start to wear out. The miscellaneous wear and tear on them. Getting dropped on the ground, banged against things, taken apart and washed and put back together. And for most helmets, once the foam wears out, that's it. They no longer are fit to purpose as a helmet and should be replaced.
Back when I rode a motorcycle -- which was commuting to work for the better part of 2 decades -- I always got the most affordable, comfortable DOT-labeled helmet I could find. Any extra gadgets had to be aftermarket addons that could be portable. Because things like headphones, for me, always lasted 2-3 times as long as the helmet.
MAYBE a really high-end helmet has a longer service life. But I am skeptical even a really fancy one worn by a commuter using it near-daily would last more than maybe 4 or 5 years. They're going to have lifetimes like smartphones, for sure. Which means these gadget helms sure do have a high subscription fee to use.
But like, what's your point?
Setting aside all the practical ways this suit could be handled affordably (e.g., her actual damages were a much smaller monetary sum compared to that invoiced amount and probably eligible for small claims)...
Having a policy around cancellations in the invoices would not materially effect anything here. While it might be helpful to ensure a good-faith customer behaves in a professional and appropriate way, such policies have little effect on a bad-faith customer.
Even without an explicit policy, this is fairly straightforward promissory estoppel, or at least something very much like it. If she had a policy, she would have a very strong case. Without, I still reckon she has a very strong case -- pretty much just as strong. Either way, the recourse is the courts.
Eh, if she really wanted to take it to court I'm relatively sure her case is sound. A reasonable man knows you cannot cancel such a large order of perishable goods on short notice. She probably had her own reasons, whether lack of savvy, a belief the media campaign would serve her better, or maybe even just that she doesn't want to go to court.
Nah bro, you are.
It's ALSO possible to generate virtual phone numbers for a small cost.
Using a cryptographic PoW is a different small cost.
Either way, it only takes a small cost to prevent mass bot registration.
You're treating processing power and time as if it is 100% free just because it can be done in a VM. But it doesn't matter if it is a VM. It is still going to require at least some certain threshold of processor time, and that processor time has a real cost. For the kind of place that can just spin up thousands of VMs and use it to do massive bot registration... they could just be mining bitcoins instead.
It's not just whether you can do this. It's how much value it has vs what ELSE you could be doing with the time and energy. A Signal account is already worth vanishingly little as a spam tool, they just need to give it enough of a cost to make it not worthwhile.
I still cannot comprehend their logic for why having full SMS integration would be such a disaster. It just makes no sense and I wish they'd admit that it isn't a security concern but is just that they don't want to do it. They just don't want to, and don't care that this policy makes it harder for users to adopt and use their service.
I know that SMS is a US-specific thing. But at least in the US, most people regularly interact with SMS. Having a platform that supports SMS means you can basically live in that platform -- this is a major part of the success of iMessage.
The idea that it would create huge security gaps... I just don't believe. I think the kind of user who wants to be on Signal clearly understands that SMS is not secure. All they need to do is have a clear visual indication when you are texting instead of using Signal, which isn't that complex.
Instead, people like me who might try using it as their primary platform just see no point. None of my friends use it. So why should I even have it installed? And none of my friends see a reason to install it because I and everyone else don't have it installed. If I could use it as my SMS app I might have it installed and lived-in, which greatly lowers that barrier.
You're talking about a device which is a full-color high-definition surveillance camera that works at night and can be viewed from literally anywhere in the world and can be configured to send you alerts based on seeing people/animals/packages/whatever. That only costs them an inflation adjusted $13.
I don't really think the "they wouldn't believe this shit" argument really applies with how rapidly tech has changed.
Look up your local neighborhood / neighborhood electric vehicle / low-speed vehicle laws.
There are some places where they are allowed. There's also a lot of places where the cops just don't care enough to do anything about it, at least so long as you stay off arterial roads.
Though I cannot recommend a cargo ebike enough. Long-tail or bakfiets, though I personally prefer the long-tails as they ride more like bikes and the racks on the back tend to be extremely versatile for mounting weird stuff. The cheapest good ones are around $1,200 with near-0 cost of ownership. Incredibly useful vehicles.