If you’re pressing a button and want to cancel you can pretty much universally just move off the button before releasing the press and it won’t trigger the action. Works 99% of the time with a mouse, almost as often with a touch interface. Some custom-coded buttons will action on start press (not great imo) and some buttons do some other action on a long press, but if you’re holding it and nothing else has happened just dragging off is safe enough.
I’m not sure I follow that analogy, if you get a ride to a hospital you don’t expect it to lock off all other destinations. What happens in the hospital is irrelevant.
From reading the article, this is more like if you walk into a hotel and they burn down your house so you have no choice but to stay. I suppose in theory you could argue in very bad faith that this is a problem with the house since it’s the house that burned, but in reality the problem is the fact they’re the ones who started the fire.
Ads. Specifically, a popup served by the OS about chrome and switching to bing or edge or something like that. I didn’t even use chrome, just having it installed was enough for them. Any ads baked into the OS is unacceptable, but that’s just so far over the line that I find it insane anyone still uses Windows at all.
I contacted support to complain and their “solution” was to reinstall the OS, so I installed a better one instead.
I’m not really sure what you’re asking since your post is a but unfocused, but if your problem is that you have too many addresses with different providers you could simply redirect mail from alternate addresses to whichever one you actually check. When I switched to proton I didn’t delete my old gmail account, I simply imported my old emails and set up email forwarding (see here for Proton’s migration instructions from Gmail). If you want to completely de-Google you don’t need to do it all at once, just migrate accounts to your new addresses as needed.
If you want a separate account for your PC then this does of course require a separate account. There isn’t really a solution there since your problem is also your requirement. You could set up separate folders or aliases for your PC and phone but that might not have the same level of separation you want.
I’d recommend switching away from Chrome-based browsers entirely anyway due to Google forcing through questionable standards by throwing their near-monopoly around, but using one Google service doesn’t mean it’s pointless to switch away from others. You don’t need to do everything at once.
I’m on Mint with a nvidia card, I haven’t really had to do any tweaks since I stopped trying to install games on an NTFS-formatted drive and nearly every game works perfectly out of the box. There’s a lot of very loud voices complaining about nvidia/tinkering but it’s definitely not universal; you won’t necessarily need to put in a lot of effort to get games to work on Linux.
Because that would be the same quality. This is the internet, if an image is still recognisable after being shared five times you’re doing something wrong.
Very unconvincing. The only point they bring up which actually precludes RAM-only servers is hard drive encryption, which they only need to do because they store data on a hard drive. The whole article reads like them trying to justify a choice they’ve already made rather than a legitimate comparison RAM-only versus hard drives.
Their first point is literally that RAM-only doesn’t help when the power’s on. That’s like saying you shouldn’t wear a seatbelt because it doesn’t protect against someone smashing your window. That’s just not what it’s for.
UK is under BST (UTC+1) for half the year but people are usually just taught that the UK is GMT (UTC+0) which is based in the time in Greenwich, withought mentioning DST. I suppose it’s also possible everyone is taught BST and just forgets about it because daylight savings sucks, but either way most people seem to think GMT and UK time are the same thing.
This means you’ll get people asking for GMT times when they want BST or UK local time.
I feel like someone not releasing anything but squatting IP rights for 13 years is a poor argument for longer copyright terms.
Your security is only as good as the weakest link, which is usually people. If your password policy encourages users to stick a note to their screen then your weakest link is anyone in the office deciding to take a selfie or joining a call with their camera on. Best practices balance security with what users are actually willing to do.
Good luck remembering them all, also change them all every 30 days, so here are my secrets.
Password expiry hasn’t been considered best practice for a long time (must be at least a decade now?) largely because of the other points you mentioned; it leads to weak easily memorable passwords written somewhere easily accessible. Even when it was considered good 30 days would have been an unusually short time.
Current advice is to change passwords whenever there’s a chance it’s been compromised, not on a schedule.
If someone said they were concerned about their sugar intake would you tell them to just stop eating entirely? It’s possible to take steps towards privacy-friendly services without cutting yourself off from the modern world in the same way as you can cut back on sugar and still eat food.
You absolutely do not need to “burn all your devices” to improve your privacy, suggesting so is unhelpful at best.
QR codes essentially just encode text, as long as you’re using a sensible QR code reader and check any URLs before opening them there’s minimal risk to scanning a QR code.
There’s definitely some issues that jump out to me on first read.
1. I’m not sure about “indivisible”. An area should be able to self-govern if desired. More detail needed.
2. Awful. Removing people’s voting rights in general is bad, and something as nebulous as “a criminal offence” is incredibly easy to abuse. Are people no longer citizens if they steal a loaf of bread? Also, voting age here is 16/18.
4. No. Guns are incredibly rare where I am. I’d rather not have one, and I’d prefer not to risk getting shot every time some asshole on the street gets mad.
7. Limiting land to a single use is generally not a great idea. What if for instance you have too much agricultural land and not enough housing?
10. A central state-owned bank isn’t a bad idea, but abolishing all non-state banks is iffy. Should the government really have so much direct control over everyone’s finances?
12. Your salary should not be based on the amount of unprotected sex you have. That’s just silly. Other support should be available for those who need it.
I’m not sure that’s a completely accurate analogy either. When you’re using a VPN people can still see that you are sending traffic through your tunnel, they just can’t tell what it is that you’re sending. It’s like looking through frosted glass; there’s definitely something moving in there but you can’t tell what.
I suppose the best way to describe it is you send a locked box to a trusted friend; everyone handling it can see the box but can’t tell what’s inside. Inside the box is a letter, your friend posts it so it looks like it came from them. Your friend then gets a reply, puts it in a locked box, and send it back to you. Nobody between you and your friend can snoop on your mail but anyone between your friend and the final destination can.
This may have been true historically but I’m not sure it still holds up. I switched to Linux Mint as my regular OS a while back and the only driver issue I’ve had was that the installer didnt properly install my wifi card’s proprietary driver (which was working during live boot from usb), so I had to tether to my phone to download the driver through the driver manager. It even installed Nvidia drivers just fine.
It might still be an issue for more barebones or heavily customisable systems but I’m fairly certain nobody’s recommending people switch to Arch for their first Linux experience.
Being limited to only three options doesn’t sound very democratic but I suppose it’s better than a two party system. Instead of adding a self-destruct button, have you considered switching to a system which better represents the people?
I like the idea of splitting timelines if reverse time travel is possible, but it does have some consequences. The biggest one being that it means you can’t actually travel back in time. Time travel may even be relatively simple but as it has no effect on the primary timeline you will never be able to change the past as it appears there; travelling back in time simply creates an alternate reality. As far as the primary timeline inhabitants are concerned, you have either died or vanished (or maybe nothing appeared to happen at all) but you have not travelled in time. It also means it’s impossible to return to your original timeline as further reverse time travel will only create new alternate timelines, the closest you can get is a timeline that closely resembles your home one.
Another fun approach is that infinitely many alternate timelines already exist (think Many Worlds), travelling back in time simply means you spontaneously form in another world through quantum fluctuations or something equally hand-wavey. The thing I find interesting about this one is that it doesn’t necessarily involve time travel at all. You form with the memories of having travelled in time, sure, but you have just spontaneously formed through quantum fluctuations so it’s reasonable to assume your memories have too; it may have just been a randomly formed memory that didn’t actually happen. Since it’s just random fluctuations there’d also be infinitely many universes where you spontaneously pop into existence with no time travel memory, so I suppose in a way this never was time travel. The original timeline would be unaffected by this kind of travel as you can only move to universes where you have already spawned in.
The way I see it the only way to actually change the past in your current timeline arguably involves destroying the universe. You’d have a single timeline and each instance of reverse time travel cuts off your timeline’s future and links back to a previous point from which time can continue. You can visualise this timeline as a piece of string, time travel is a loop in that string. If you travel back in time by a year, everything you did in that past year is within that loop off to the side of the primary timeline; the loop starts and ends at the same point. Time travel would essentially delete your future and plonk you back onto the primary timeline. No need to worry about the grandfather paradox; you were born in a loop off to the side of real time so killing your grandfather doesn’t change that loop. It works around the bootstrap paradox for similar reasons; the information was created in some loop somewhere, even if it appears to have created itself on the prime line. It’s a nice thought experiment but the problem here is that if you travel back in time but fail to change the conditions which caused the time travel you may have just ended the universe in an infinite time loop.
Where I am most people are happy to drink the tap water, and we’re all oddly proud of it. Which is fair, it’s great water. Very soft too, I remember seeing ads on TV for products to remove limescale but that doesn’t really happen here much. I find it a little odd that some places’ tap water is so full of impurities that it leaves mineral deposits on their appliances.
Come to Scotland, try our tap water!
This didn’t sound right to me, I’m sure I heard LGBT more than 15 years ago, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia LGBT was first used around 1988 but OED says 1992, other sources say it became widespread in either the 90s or 00s (varies by source). So 15 is a lower bound for widespread usage but I don’t think we can get much more specific than “15 to 35 years ago”.