Local councils can create some value by allowing people to pay council taxes, fees and fines with the issued currency. Enough to peg it 1:1 with the USD? I'll be honest, I don't know how countries like panama manage that, so hell if I know how a council would do it.
Fundamentally, this is what underwrites the US dollar as well. If you don't pay your taxes you (eventually, provided you aren't connected enough to avoid it) get arrested. You can generate your wealth in corn or software or boat building, but you have to pay your taxes in US dollars. You can't barter your boats for corn and pay your taxes in corn. Thus, (almost) everyone in the US needs some US dollars to avoid being jailed. This is the foundation upon which the value of the US dollar is built.
Of course, making sure it doesn't blow up in the councils face in a few months/years time due to lax issuing controls is a different matter.
I have been habitually sending "I have finished using your service, could you please delete my account" emails since around 2008 or so.
Prior to GDPR, 9 replies in 10 would be polite but dismissive responses, basically telling me that I'm making an unreasonably burdensome request.
Post GDPR, everyone responds with a message stating they have followed my request in a timely fashion.
Am I disappointing that GDPR has not fined Facebook into oblivion? Yeah. I was hoping for global scale schadenfreude as much as the next person.
However, GDPR has fundamentally normalized the notion that peoples relationships with companies need not be permanent, and that submitting to eternal spam is not the accepted price of buying a flight online. GDPR has established in law that it's totally reasonable for people to not want to give their local gym an iris scan in order to enter the gym and work out, and it is indeed the gym owner who's the arsehole in that situation. This grants leverage against the arsehole.
In that respect, it's been a smashing success. There is much we could improve on, but on the statement "it only benefited the lawyers"...hard disagree.
His experience was shit, total shit. Knowing his experience, I would avoid the site he chose like the plague. But now, let me ask you this, should I test each and every ebook retailer to try to find one that isn't shit, paying every time?
Should customers start maintaining their own index of which ebook providers are shit? Who pays to have someone go back and check them all once a week to see if they've changed their behavior since the last $7 purchase to check their DRM practices? Should customers pay a monthly subscription to some kind of digital mystery shopper service to find out who's webstores are just the fucking worst?
Your customers have _no_ reasonable path to control over shitty DRM practices. The only person in this entire conversation who has influence is Turukawa, because Turukawa is an author, and gets to choose who sells his books.
Bad news everyone: piracy exists, and provides a pretty great user flow. If authors want people to not pirate ebooks, they need to demand a not shit ebook option that /has a strong brand of being not shit/. Yeah, short term that might be really hard. Maybe authors need to form some kind of union and demand better from their publishers.
Because customers don't care. You can rant and rave about how they're immoral subhumans stealing from the mouths of authors children all you want, but piracy still exists and it's a much easier way of getting high quality ebooks that work on all platforms and devices. It's not the customers fault that zlib has a better reputation than your ebook retail partners, nor is it zlibs.
>Why do you feel so entitled to such ultimate convenience?
Businesses are in the game of enticing customers. If your homeware store is so bad that double-digit percentages of the population choose to steal glasses and cutlery from local bars rather than shop at your store, you need to take a long hard look at your business and figure out what the fuck you're doing so wrong.
You can bitch and moan about how it's wrong for people to steal from the bars if you want, but that's reality denial. It will not get you more customers.
Yes and no. I can't lie, I was really hoping for a significant company to be put up against a wall and shot, maybe a major retailer that won't let you check out online without giving a phone number or whatever. The notion of data being a toxic asset[1] still hasn't really sunk into the higher ranks of most large orgs.
However, I've found GDPR deletion requests to be a pretty strong cudgel. For the last 10 years or so I've been sending deletion requests for accounts when I no longer need them. Prior to GDPR, about 50% of responses would be along the lines of "in the nicest possible way, we don't care about you enough to do that so please fuck off". Reading between the lines, I assumed that about 50% of websites were implemented poorly and didn't properly support deletion.
Post GDPR, all but one request have been given a polite "we have done as you have requested, we hope to see you as a customer again". GDPR has both legitimized the process of requesting that your data has been deleted after you're finished using a service, and has legitimized the concerns of all those developers who were never able to get engineering time to properly support account deletion.
So it's been a success, it could be succeeding more but I'm not unhappy. I would still like to see at least one company get ICBM'd in order to remind larger entities that they've got responsibilities to society too, not just their shareholders.
You never did give your graphics card model number, but according to this[1] page the Brazos platform had two codename variants for laptops and notebooks: Ontario and Zacate. Hondo and Desna were exclusively for tablets. There were no variants for desktops.
According to this page[2] that puts your card somewhere in the Radion HD 6xxx or HD7xxx driver set, and the only references to Ontario are the Radeon HD 6290 and the Radeon HD 7340.
If you go to the AMD drivers download page[3] you'll discover that both of these cards have dropped off the bottom of the list of supported cards in their respective driver categories.
Now hey, maybe your card is a slightly newer model and it's still in that download list. I don't know, since I don't know your exact card model. But my 10 seconds of research says that actually it's probably not supported any more. If I'm wrong about that then you're pretty god damn close to the cliff edge at this point.
I gather from your comment that it's been a while since you refreshed your knowledge of the current state of linux.
Graphics card driver issues largely stopped being a problem about 4 years ago, with both major graphics card manufacturers committing to open source drivers.
In fairness, you're probably right about them not requiring a DPO. I thought that was required for any organization over a certain size, but it seems it's required for any sized organization that tracks people with a certain amount of enthusiasm. A court would have to determine if they meet that criteria, I guess.
However, with response to this:
>but their US site seems like it would be out of scope for GDPR according to Article 3, because it is not offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union.
You're referring to Article 3.a. The argument on whether the US site is offering services to EU citizens if it does not take active steps to forbid VPNs or place "are you currently in the EU?" gates in place is something only a court could rule on.
However, more importantly, you're skipping over 3.b.
>the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union.
That's unquestionably happening for anyone in the EU that uses a VPN to connect to their US website. Hence, their GDPR obligation is not discharged if they are under EU jurisdiction.
The GDPR does not lay out a set of ways to handle EU citizen data. If you ctrl-f search "citizen" in the GDPR document[1] you'll get no hits. It lays out the way /companies are expected to handle personal data/. Americans may not realise this, but they have the right under EU law to file GDPR requests against EU companies. They may even be able to file them against American companies, although which companies are or are not in scope gets complex at that point and I really don't know enough about who is incorporated or has subsidiaries where to know which companies that would work against if it came down to lawyers in courtrooms.
The point is, if a company falls under the territorial scope, they have to extend GDPR rights to /everyone/, because it's not about who you're allowed to track, it's about how you're allowed to use tracking technologies.
>I imagine they get a pretty low amount of EU traffic, and so went for the least effort path to deal with GDPR.
But they haven't actually dealt with it. This is a common misunderstanding among websites that do this.
EU citizens are not required to identify themselves to you preemptively for GDPR to apply. If I connect to their website via a US VPN and they start tracking me without asking my consent assuming I'm from the US, that's a violation of GDPR.
So, in reality, there are two cases here:
1. They do not operate under EU jurisdiction, and thus might as well not have bothered making the EU specific page since the EU has no leverage over them any more than china can force them to take down articles that paint the chinese government in a negative light.
2. They do operate under EU jurisdiction, in which case their EU specific website is not in and of itself enough to handle their GDPR liability. Regardless on your opinion on VPNs, they must still for example nominate a specific data protection officer if they fall under EU jurisdiction.
I suspect that at least some of the websites with EU specific experiences know that the EU experience legally speaking doesn't achieve anything and are attempting to use them as a protest movement disguised as a self-righteous compliance effort. A whole bunch of other websites then didn't do their homework and are blindly hopping on the bandwagon.
The funny thing is the whole thing is backfiring, since a common reaction is "the EU experience is really nice I wish it was like this for americans as well".
Discord has aggressive security measures. I can't use it, because it won't let me access it from my desktop unless I give it a phone number. I guess it's decided I look like a headless browser or something.
Certainly I'd say discord is a poor fit for an organization allegedly dedicated to web freedoms, such as mozilla.
I'd suggest rocketchat or mattermost, personally. Well, to be honest I'd suggest IRC, but if that must be abandoned, rocketchat is pretty good.
Article 6.1.e "in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;" - Wide open door.
Article 9.2.d - exception to prohibition on racial profiling for political parties on their own membership.
Article 9.2.g "processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest, on the basis of Union or Member State law which shall be proportionate to the aim pursued" - The "anything we declare acceptable" biometrics exception.
Article 9.2.h - The "no opting out of online medical records" clause.
Article 17.3.b "or for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller" - The "if we say it's in the public interest not to delete it then we don't have to delete it" clause.
Article 23.1 - The laundry list of cases where any EU government can throw out all rights the GDPR establishes. Includes the following: "other important objectives of general public interest of the Union or of a Member State" as if that's not a goalpost a mile wide.
Article 49.1.d - Allows transfers of data to countries with inadequate data protections to take place if they are declared to be "in the public interest".
===
Pretty much everything in the GDPR document is untested at this point, and whether government or corporation, quite a lot of cases are going to have to be argued before the courts.
However, this document leaves open many arguments for governments that are not open for others. There is no definition for what might be "in the public interest" in GDPR, nor are there guidelines for interpreting when someone is "exercising official authority". One could argue that police departments are doing that 24/7 and thus large chunks of GDPR don't apply to them at all because processing is always lawful as a result.
By leaving themselves so many fruitful avenues of arguments to present to courts that have not been granted to others, the collective EU governments have created a law that holds others to a higher standard than themselves. Hence, hypocritical.
80 bytes is all that OP_RETURN can store, and what’s more that information is subject to deletion. That’s because bitcoin nodes are capable of pruning “provably unspendable” UTXOs for efficiency, which include OP_RETURN data.
TL;DR the last time the schadenfreudists were looking for something to point and laugh at on this front, they didn't understand the technicalities of what they were talking about _at all_.
This BBC article makes an interesting claim:
"In January, the amount of data that could be added to the BSV block chain was increased significantly.
Before that, people could generally add only short chunks of text or web links to the block chain.
But now it is possible to add full images in an encoded format."
I've never heard of this BSV coin before, so I don't know the details of this change. Assuming it's a fork of bitcoin and all they did was increase the allowable size of the OP_RETURN, this will once again be sensationalist reporting with no substance. I'd imagine the first thing BSV nodes would do is prune the OP_RETURN garbage because who wants to be paying the storage cost of other peoples embedded images?
But hey, the BBC article is extremely light on details. Maybe this is something that can't be pruned so easily? Does anyone know?
>In case my point isn't obvious here, an explicit CoC has a number of advantages over a document like this one when it comes to actually resolving conflict, instead of trying to prevent it. It makes value judgements, but only because at some point in the conflict resolution process, leadership will be forced to make value judgements.
I disagree. Sociopaths weaponise hard and fast rules. It's better to not make rules that aren't required and stick to communicating as people rather than attempting to rule like computers. Don't choose to be a bureaucrat, choose to be a leader.
Put another way, there's no substitute for not being a horrible human being. Projects that have good people on them have no need for CoC's. Horrible people will not stop being horrible because there is a CoC there, nor will a CoC drive them away.
I don't really feel like getting into a roleplay with you about your specific Angry Project Lead scenario on hacker news, it's a bad forum for that since such discussions tend to be long and nuanced, but you should remember that when you have to tell someone their behavior is a net loss for their organization, it's never going to be a fun conversation. Obviously the person will protest, and depending on their personality that might range from pleading to outright physical aggression.
Everyone coming away from such discussions feeling unhappy is normal, what matters is that there is some form of resolution in the process. Yeah, the outcome might be a forked project, or it might be someone being asked to leave. Those are not comfortable outcomes but they are hopefully necessary, otherwise why bother to have the conversation? As long as you can bring the project to a state where you've moved past the obstacle and it's no longer at the forefront of peoples minds, you've succeeded. If people are still discussing your ruling and what it means for contributors months or years later, you've failed.
If resolution can be achieved without verbal, societal, technological or physical violence, that's the best that can be asked.
The existence of this article kind of shows why I don't care for codes of conduct. It exemplifies the attitude of "you're not obeying my document entitled 'how to be a good person', so by definition you must be a bad person", and that's simply not true. It is, however, a repulsive attitude. Just because you named it that doesn't mean that's what you've written. Let me break it down:
1. There's no substitute for not being a horrible person. Good people don't need codes of conduct, and jerks aren't changed by codes of conduct.
2. Codes of conduct are a political tool, not a technical one. It is very hard to define human behavior, which means by their nature codes of conduct are relatively general and then get interpreted to fit specific cases.
3. Jerks like politics, because they're a great smokescreen.
Codes of conduct cannot possibly help organizations. No one changes their behavior to meet a code of conduct. Instead, it becomes a reason to exile users. That in itself is fine, but unnecessary. Most organizations have either a formal or defacto leader that can unilaterally excommunicate offensive members, either with a ban button or simply through social pressure.
When a leader does this, their decision can be questioned. The question revolves around "did the leader do the right thing for the community?". Once you introduce a code of conduct, the question becomes "did the leader make a decision in line with the code of conduct?", and that's a really shitty question to use as the guiding star for a community.
Once a community is in a position where it's making decisions based on an arbitrary piece of paper, it's easy for the very people the code is trying to protect against to use that code to solidify political power. The interpretations are pushed to be broader, and people start rules-lawyering their political adversaries with the CoC. This is not a healthy place for a community to be in. Jerks can no longer be excluded for being unhelpful and obstructionist, as long as they do it in a way that doesn't violate the CoC. Codifying your community behind a CoC reduces your flexibility because it gives people ammunition to argue against the statement "you're being horrible and we don't want you, goodbye".
I've seen this cause the ultimate heat-death of multiple formerly delightful internet communities. The pillars of the community get slowly weeded out because they refuse to bow down to the precise wording of the almighty CoC, the nazi moderators set in, the baseload members migrate to wherever the pillars went, and the community withers.
I've done it before and I'm bored of the cycle. I'll happily work with a team of enthusiastic people run by a benevolent dictator for life who isn't afraid to convo me and tell me I'm being a wanker. Tell me I've got to abide by the 37 point grand thesis to not triggering people and I'm out.
>Try setting a calendar entry for a date on which you'll follow up if you haven't heard anything back
Thanks for the advice, but surprisingly I have actually tried just not having ADD. This simple advice doesn't work very well for me, which is why I'm attempting to pursue medication again. The calendar entry goes off, I try to contact the doctor, maybe they're not in today, it's half way through the work day, I go to set another, I spot an email while I'm doing it and start following up on that, and then 4 months later it never happened.
>Not to mention that by the time you get to your doctor, un-medicated, you will forget to tell about half of your symptoms.
This is actually a major problem. I was diagnosed with ADD as a child but gave up the medication in my late teens because it had side-effects I didn't enjoy.
Late last year, I thought it might be worth trying it again, maybe with a milder dose. I booked an appointment with a doctor, who referred me to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist told me there was a two week waiting period and that they'd call me back in a few weeks, and never did. It was two months before I remembered to follow it up.
I don't bore you with the rest of the details, but the short version is every medical professional I spoke to (and I spoke to about 5 during this saga) told me to wait and that they would organize something for me, and then didn't. Turns out if you lie to someone with ADD and leave the organization ball in their court like that, they'll never get treatment, because they struggle with the very thing you're asking them to do. It's pretty much the worst thing you can do for them.
Anyway, I've just realized I was planning to talk to the doctor about it again 4 months ago to try to get the ball rolling again. It's Christmas now, they won't be back at work until mid January. I'd better send myself an email, wish me luck.
Fundamentally, this is what underwrites the US dollar as well. If you don't pay your taxes you (eventually, provided you aren't connected enough to avoid it) get arrested. You can generate your wealth in corn or software or boat building, but you have to pay your taxes in US dollars. You can't barter your boats for corn and pay your taxes in corn. Thus, (almost) everyone in the US needs some US dollars to avoid being jailed. This is the foundation upon which the value of the US dollar is built.
Of course, making sure it doesn't blow up in the councils face in a few months/years time due to lax issuing controls is a different matter.