Don't consumer laws help? In the UK if Anker won't help you can just return it to where you bought it from. Defects in design or from the factory are grounds for a return/replacement, regardless of age. You would have to prove that the fault was always there, but fortunately Anker did that for you by issuing a recall.

That didn't happen with the COVID protests though, did it? No mass disappearances, and the images were shared widely on social media and abroad. There was some reaction and police intervention, but for the most part they were peaceful and allowed to happen, and in the end the government relented and lifted lockdown restrictions.

China isn't North Korea. It isn't the China of 40 years ago. These days the kind of stuff you are talking about, the kind of stuff happening in LA right now, isn't how things are.

That boat sailed years ago, people have been synchronizing passwords between devices for a long time. It's overall better for security because the alternative is that people just use the same password for everything, and one hack nets potentially millions of accounts across hundreds of websites. The only mitigation is annoying stuff like forced 2FA where they sent you a code by email or SMS, both crap solutions but the only universal ones.

Passkeys are far, far better. They take the hassle out of it for the user, and are still more secure than passwords. You can still have 2FA if you want it.

What better options exist?

Japan, like most developed nations, had a social contract where you pay your taxes and get a pension and old age care in return. As the population of working age people declines, and the elderly live longer, the cost of maintaining that promise gets higher.

There are mitigations like socializing care to reduce costs, but they can only do so much. China is experimenting with elderly care robots, but unless than pans out there is no getting away from this being a significant and very difficult problem.

Promises were made, and promises need to be broken. As an example, in the UK the boomers did really well because there were a lot of them, so the cost of paying pensions for smaller generations that came before them and were thinned out by two world wars was low. They gave themselves very generous pensions, thinking that the economy and population would continue to grow forever.

Of course it didn't, subsequent generations were smaller, and can't afford the cost of boomer pensions and healthcare. Worse still the boomers are upset about immigration being used to make up the numbers.

Another example is house prices. They went up massively for boomers and older gen X. But that was a one off, they aren't going to go up again like that for millennials and gen Z, who can't afford to buy them anyway. Massive wealth was created, at the expense of the next generation, and the same opportunity is not available to them.

The only solution is to break the promises that were made based on that assumption of an ever growing economy. Slash pension costs, tax them, force property prices down and tax inherited homes. It can be done in ways that don't make things worse for the poorer pensioners, and the value of your house is irrelevant if you treat it as somewhere to live, not an investment. End NIMBYism too.

Unfortunately I don't think any politician has the balls to actually do it. Without mandatory voting, they have to pander to the people who vote the most... Boomers.

Shoving people onto packed trains hasn't been a thing for a couple of decades. They extended the platforms and added more carriages, as well as adding more trains and building new lines. They are one of those countries that actually does infrastructure decently well, and fixes problems.

Japan doesn't really have a space problem, it's more an issue with where people want to live. That's something that can be improved with better transport links, and Japan's excellent mixed land use that allows for offices and small factories in residential areas. Work from home too, of course.

The issue with declining population is that there aren't enough people working to pay for the retired and elderly in need of care. One of the reasons boomers did so well was that they are a large cohort, so there were many of them paying for a smaller number of elderly, making it more affordable. Now they are reaching retirement the current working population has to pay for them, and there are a lot of boomers.

Israel is a rogue state, akin to North Korea and Russia. State sponsored terrorism, genocide, hacking for profit, harbouring sex offenders accused of having hundreds of child victims, apartheid, violent crack-downs on protesters... There isn't a box they don't tick.

Because the nuclear part is stupid and expensive, won't be ready for at least 20 years (Hinkley Point C is delayed beyond the 20 year mark now), and will be redundant by the time it is finished. The contracts they had to offer to get it build guarantee we must pay for nuclear power no matter how expensive it is compared to the alternatives, so it locks us in for 50+ years.

The price of energy is way too high in the UK, because of our reliance of gas and nuclear.

3. to prevent typosquatting of posted URLs with strange character sets.

No homo(glyphs)

No that's perfect, I love to post shit like this in a variety of places. Thanks.

I will do that. I use gnumeric all the time for small CSVs because of the quick startup, but I haven't tried it on large files recently. Last time I did, it didn't acquit itself well, but I will give it another go. When I'm doing this it's really always CSVs, and I'm just trying to massage some data slightly before I import it somewhere. I finally resorted to just writing perl, but it was to do things that would have been faster to do in a spreadsheet if it didn't crater.

Why do you imagine that it is crap? Every expert disagrees with you.

Aww you're so cute. Dumb, but cute.

You think you can be sure you've disabled all of that functionality.

Those are certainly all letters, but they don't prevent international espionage.

Some of us are just smart enough to call a fascist a fascist, and just dumb enough to do it, too. But you're dumb enough to deep throat the boot.

I will continue to resist this regime as long as I am able, because failure to do so is how to be destroyed by it.

This handheld not Microsoft hardware, though, it's an Asus.

The UK *is* expanding hydro. We have pumped storage being built up in Scotland, and it looks like they might finally do some sort of Severn tidal system.

Yes, it creates the same binary your Pixel runs. Google use a common kernel for all devices running a given version of Android. All the hardware specific stuff is loaded as modules at runtime, it's not baked into the kernel.

One of the main reasons for doing that is because then they can use an LTS kernel, and it becomes much easier to issue security patches for all Android devices. Even if the manufacturer doesn't update the kernel, mitigation can be done via modules or in userspace. Having a known, standard kernel, makes it possible to roll out to all devices via Play Services.