You don't need an account to browse the steam store, you need one to verify you're a user before downloading/installing a game, or (obviously) buying a game.
In a perfect world, you wouldn't need an account to buy or download something, either. It's too bad we've somehow normalized this idea that you need an account just to buy something.
> Are you worried Android is going to lose power users to iPhone? What are the alternative shops you're referring to here? We're not buying pastries.
Are you 13 years old? Who in their right mind would even care that "all the power users" went and bought iPhones? Are thoughts like this keeping you up at night?
> I don't know if people's imaginations are lacking here, but there could easily be a world in which your 'alternative' verifier would still make you wait 24h (or longer).
It's your imagination that's failing; we don't want ANY verifier at all, whatsoever. Nobody should be able to reach into my phone OS and have a say regarding what I can install or not.
> The wait is clearly a security mechanism, regardless of who makes you do it.
"Security mechanism" to protect WHO from WHAT, exactly? And please don't repeat the drivel about scams that Google's pushing, we all know those are excuses, "It's for the CHILDREEEENNNN!!!!" sure.
> or is your actual problem the identity of the entity making you do it, or is your actual problem that the power is too concentrated in one entity, regardless of the entity? These are very different issues with very different solutions.
So you DO know what's going on! In that case I have no idea why you're arguing in favor of having a gate placed in front of our [personal, owned] phones to regulate what we do with our own devices.
> So you DO know what's going on! In that case I have no idea why you're arguing in favor of having a gate placed in front of our [personal, owned] phones to regulate what we do with our own devices.
Then you're not understanding anything I'm writing, and I don't have the energy to keep going.
All I'm saying is that you need to pick your battles carefully and be honest about your goals if you want to have a fighting chance of winning this war against general-purpose computing. I want to win this just as much as you. I don't want to lose it, and I certainly don't want to lose it in a dumb way. Dying on the wrong hill during the wrong battle because people on my side constantly lie, exaggerate, and otherwise misrepresent reality and turn away would-be supporters is probably the dumbest way to see this happen, and it should make you angry, if you actually want some success in what you're doing.
Just wanted to amend this to note that what I wrote also applies to the war against ownership, etc... I'm making no attempt to be exhaustive here, just trying to get a larger point across.
No, you can't; not without jumping through hoops, not without clicking on fake warnings, not without a song and a dance about fake "saving you from scammers" scare tactics.
Please stop covering for Google. They're behaving badly, people are reacting, stop with the "Achucally..." which is pretty grating and cringe worthy.
I get where you're coming from ivenjermakov, but the root cause of why we have a Linux, why Unix even existed, why Woz & Jobs created Apple, and so forth, is because creative, smart people want to break the hold of "common stuff".
Not to diss you, but these kind of questions ("Why another distro?", "Why another language?", "Why another ssh server/client/framework"? and so forth) have been asked zillions of times already, and the answer is always the same: the current offerings were not enough, for whatever definition of "enough" was at the time, and those offerings were tied down by whatever social structure or framework that did not work for these creative folks. I love that we have the freedom to explore with technology in the way we do.
I sometimes wonder what the tipping point is for people, or whether there actually is one for many.
It's as if they are looking for an exacting duplicate of previous regimes before they become concerned—the agency name must be "Stasi" and uniforms must be of the same color.
The moment never happens. It happened in all other descents to fascism, just like this one, that people kept waiting for the moment to protest and it never came and eventually it was too late.
Great example! Rosa Parks was an organised effort by an organised resistance group. She was not just one woman who decided to get on the wrong end of the bus one day.
Yeah, I wrote about this on HN before. Americans tend to imagine that WW2 ends and then East Germany immediately puts up a wall and now nobody can leave but it was way more gradual than that. The year the European war ended you could just walk across the border, you'd need to show some ID but you have ID because it was the war and Germans issued everybody with ID in the war. The Allies are manning the borders, they want to arrest Nazis, so ID saying you're a Nazi is a bad idea, but if you're just some farmer from outside Leipzig (so East Germany) you can easily cross. More than a Million people flee West. Are they foolish? You already know the answer.
By the end of the 1940s, things are tightening up, there are now armed "police" who in effect work for the Soviets "protecting" East Germany at the border, barbed wire and deep trenches now block unofficial crossings, but it is still definitely possible to leave, in the worst case maybe you bribe a guard. Hundreds of thousands are able to flee by "just" walking (or driving) West.
In 1952 the "Special Regime" begins to "keep out spies". Most of the border is sealed, you can't bribe your way when there is no official crossing, the remaining guards are told to shoot people who try to cross, after all none of them are legitimate. However since Berlin still has a crossing, and the West still seems hell bent on holding their half despite the fact it's cut off from the world, you could travel to East Berlin and sneak across to West Berlin. Over the next decade or so millions do, East Germany tried very hard to stop this, but because it was physically possible it seemed like there wasn't much they could do...
In 1961 they built the wall. It was no longer physically possible to escape.
I was told the famous Berlin crossing is called Checkpoint Charlie because checkpoint Alpha was on the Iron Wall (the one dividing Germany) and checkpoint Bravo was midway. At each checkpoint they would note the time. If you didn't make it to each checkpoint at exactly the right time they would consider that you'd stopped to do something illegal in between (you were only allowed to drive straight from the iron wall to Berlin), and you would be disappeared.
Not quite. Alpha is at the edge of West Germany, once past Alpha you are on an Autobahn (a highway) to Berlin and physically in East Germany but the Soviets have agreed that they won't do anything so long as you never stop until you reach Bravo at the border between East Germany and West Berlin. The route between Bravo and Charlie is inside West Berlin. Charlie's significance is that the Soviets will not (by the time Charlie is created) allow non-Germans to enter East Germany legally except via this point. The West has argued that this isn't what they agreed, but have eventually relented because it's apparent that arguing isn't helping.
Definitely it can always be worse and I think we need to break ridiculous laws. I know nothing about Mark Bray but that is a ridiculous thing that should adjudicated.
At this moment there are right wing conspiracies from people like Owens and Tucker that Charlie Kirk was killed by Israel because he was getting critical of them and would be against the war.
I am not saying that these conspiracies are true, but this is how fascism looks like. Putin doesn't arrest all of his political challengers, but he gets rid of the ones that are viable opponents. In case of Kirk, he is popular enough to make it big in politics and in the short term he could break the party narrative.
You're mistaken; in my family _everyone_ has heard of and read about the "creepo glasses" and that they're associated with Facebook, and want absolutely nothing to do with them or anybody who would voluntarily wear them. Plus, they have zero problem telling anyone wearing those glasses around them to either take them off or leave.
Yes, I would consider that "massive" since none of them are HN readers nor work in any tech or media related fields.
You're arguing really really hard in favor of Meta Raybans, even to the point of coming up with excuses and false analogies. It's almost like you're arguing in bad faith and claiming ignorance of Meta's bad faith implementation of all the surveillance features they've been pushing.
Why?
Given Meta's history of disregarding everyone who's not Zuck (and him being a sociopath), why give them the benefit of any kind of doubt? Right now, everyone should assume malice as the first explanation, and then accept that maybe there was some ineptitude once evidence appears.
There's also a Pebble app called "Notes to Self": push button, dictate note, note gets transcribed and added to the timeline, either in the past (if note lacks a timestamp or is in the past) or for a future reminder. It's been the lowest friction for me to set reminders or save notes to myself about things that happened.
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