It wouldn’t necessarily just be burner phones. Many people wouldn’t want to take a valuable phone traveling in case it gets stolen. Or maybe their phone isn’t compatible with the US’s networks.

Come on, don’t give them objectively terrible advice.

Aww, someone needs scritches and treats.

Yeah, I have it for personal photos that will never be shared. If I am traveling, I want a record of where a given photo was. But those aren’t photos I am sharing, and the ones I do share get their metadata stripped.

I’m pretty sure Microsoft can tell them to fuck off. Maybe they pay millions, but even then MS has to weigh the possibility of bad press and lawsuits against a relatively paltry sum. The larger problem will be if someone finds a workaround or simply ignores the terms of service, I think. This article talked about the “United States Police Department,” but there is no such department. Law enforcement in the US is highly fragmented across the federal, state, and local levels. Any of them could just decide to break the terms of service.

Is it too much to ask for a car that doesn’t spy on me, is reasonably comfortable, is efficient, and maybe has a few extra “smart” features to help me not run into other people? I guess my bike will do for now.

Could? Yes!

Will? Well, not in the US at least. :(

I’ve seen judges let offenders off light on worse arguments. Unfortunately.

The committee that heads it and sets policy has 5 members. It has hundreds of employees. This is comparable to other key commissions like the Federal Election Commission.

The results aren’t going to be that skewed. They operate on a simple principle. There are many features available on a modern web browser with a high degree of variability. Even not having a feature is itself a piece of a fingerprint. The combination of those many, many features is going to produce a high degree of uniqueness for almost any browser.

Though some of the phone makers are finally getting the message that some of us want to keep a hold of our expensive phones for a long while. My new Pixel 8 has 7 years of security updates, which should work fine for my purposes. I’ll probably replace the battery somewhere in there, though.

They do make medicine that benefit people, but they’re going to optimize around profit. The biggest sellers are drugs for very common cancers and for conditions that require lifelong treatment like rheumatoid arthritis. Estimates vary widely, but it costs somewhere in the ballpark of $1 billion to bring a new drug to market.

It just doesn’t make sense for a drug company to produce new antibiotics when the point is to stockpile backup antibiotics to use against antibiotic resistance. The point, after all, is to not sell the product so that it is most potent when it is needed. This is one of the areas where I think it’s best for governments to chip in.

From what I’ve heard, part of the problem for antibiotics has been economic. There just isn’t a great return on investment for pharmaceutical companies to bring antibiotics to market compared to other drugs. Lowering the cost of discovery could hypothetically help develop new antibiotics and combat drug resistance. Or it could just provide another excuse for the agriculture industry to pump livestock full of antibiotics, thereby wasting any progress.

Yeah, I think you nailed it there. Even a repair-oriented phone like the Fairphone has it’s limits, especially when it gets on to later years.

Longevity is nice, but not as helpful if it can’t keep up physically with new releases.

You also have to imagine what that longevity is going to really mean. Even a sturdy phone with a good case is in an unfriendly environment. They live in pockets, purses, and get dropped. Getting updates for 10 years is great, but it’s not too useful if the phone is dead. It’s always good to pursue increased longevity, but there is diminishing return for many reasons.

All of this is very true! But it’s has to stack up against the large amount of experience with Python, both personally and in the industry. I have had to make decisions on project languages with an eye towards the abilities not just of myself, but of other people on my team. Fortunately, someone who knows Rust recently transferred onto my team, so we may do a project in Rust soon.

I would be torn between Python and Rust.

The case for Python is that I’m already very experienced in it (nearly 20 years), there’s a good job market out there for it, and the ecosystem is one of the best in existence. It’s like a comfortable well made jacket, maybe a tad worn in some areas but very functional. And it’s not standing still, with a community that’s committed to constant improvement.

Rust is more fun. I like the way it’s been put together. It can also be used in more areas. There are some niches (wasm, low level, kernel) where Python just doesn’t work. It has been able to benefit from the years of mistakes from Python and other languages on things like how it handles Unicode strings. I don’t know it as well as Python, but I barely get a chance to work with it so that could change quickly in time.

This seems very speculative. It’s not like pursuing most STEM degrees doesn’t take a large amount of reading.