"Not just the 4th and 17th character - the whole thing"
If any company asks for the 4th character of your password, that means they are storing your password in a reversible fashion, and they should be dumped.
The online account should never be logged in by anyone other than the owner. The person on the phone, if their job requires it, should have read/write access to your account, but that should be audited as "Joe Bloggs" accedsing the account
I went to the US on business - our corporate insurance means there's a $1000 excess that we pay up front.
Went to a hospital for a minor issue. At no point was there any price list shown, at the end I was asked for $390 before been given my prescription. That was the end of it I thought, sickeningly high charge for 2 minutes with a doctor, a 10p tablet, and hours of waiting around. I asked for an itemised bill, but they couldn't give me one.
A few weeks later I get another bill through the post for another $390 (slightly different amount), complete with the entire bill. The whole bill was about $2k. The 10p tablet? $250. In fact they originally gave me a 50mg one for $9, then took it off the bill, then gave me 2x25mg ones for $250. I then had a $1100 "uninsured discount" which brought the total price down to just before $800.
The bulk of the bill was a single line that was fairly incomprehensible but seemed to cover pointless taking my blood pressure 3 times and the 2 minute consultation with a Doctor who barely spoke to me, and renting the chair for a few hours I guess.
One thing that really harms the utility of cameras is face coverings. Over the last 20 years the two most prolific face coverings in the UK have been attacked in society - Hoodies and Niquab/Burkas. For various reasons the UK populatino has been conditioned to see a face covering and think "Crime". The UK's equivalent of Trump has denigrate people wearing veils, the media has spent a decade attacking "hoodies" [1]
> Massive campaign contributions is not as common in Europe
Also far more complex - the political groupings in europe (EPP, ALDE, etc) are far looser organizations than the US parties, and power is spread in lots of different levels. Most Euro countries are coalitions of smaller parties too, defence in depth.
The US and UK suffer from having just two parties that from time to time get all the power. Infiltrate one party and your time will come. Infiltrate both and you're safe.
Carmichael coal mine is planned to be 447 square km [0], over half being "surface disturbance area"
Insolation at that location is about 2.1MWh per square metre per year, or 2100GWh per square km per year. [1]
Solar panels are around 20% efficiency, so lets call it 15% to include things like support areas.
The area used by that coal mine could generate 2100 x .15 x 447 = 140TWh per year
Austrailia currently uses 190TWh/year [2], so an area the size of that one mine could generate the majority of Austrailia's electrical requirements.
That's just back of envelope numbers, if we look at existing solar plants though, Solar Star in California generates [3] 526MWh/acre, or 130GWh/sqkm -- so this plant would generate 58TWh a year, still over 25% of requirements
There are many problems with solar power, but space use in Australia is not one.
Uber lost the license because they were 'not fit or proper', nothing to do with vetting, seemingly because of a feature of the website that seemingly allows drivers to upload new photos and get other people to drive for them
> A key issue identified was that a change to Uber's systems allowed unauthorised drivers to upload their photos to other Uber driver accounts.
Other minicab firms of course don't have a photo on an app, and the passenger has to check the photo once they've got in the car (I believe PHV drivers have to show their PHV license from TFL), which puts passengers in a far worse situation when the driver doesn't match. I wonder how many small minicab firms have been determined to be not fit or proper.
What difference in vetting is there between Black Cab drivers and Minicab drivers in London?
What difference in vehicle maintenence?
The vetting process may be flawed, but it's flawed in both hackney carriage and phv licensing. This was acknowleged by say Milton Keynes, which gave a Hackney + PHV license to an applicant with convictions for rape and other serious sexual offences [0]
I have no confidence in London that the vetting process works, and the authorities are far more interested in retaining an obsolete cartel. Rather than fix their vetting procedure (which has always allowed dodgy minicab firms, which were never a threat to the powerful black cab industry), they concentrate on Uber.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/contents
Which is still in force