Oh, absolutely. My line to the court was rather dramatised for effect :)

What you’d really argue is that since your penis size is not public knowledge, then no matter whether your actual penis is big or small, the writer’s description has no bearing on the ability of the public to recognise the person being defamed as clearly you. Therefore, the accuracy or inaccuracy of the size described in writing can be simply dismissed as immaterial, with no need to inspect your pants for the truth.

Not only those points, but there’s another obvious reason it couldn’t work, too.

For any libel case to be successful, the key premise is clearly to show “This person described in writing is obviously meant to be me”

Unless you are someone whose penis size is public knowledge, then describing it as big or small doesn’t contradict other identifying details because nobody knows how big it really is.

So you can safely say “I actually have an enormous penis, your honour, but the defendant, the writer, was likely unaware of this”

There are lots of reasons why governments might desire to get rid of physical currency.

1. Crime - Physical money is the option of choice for criminals as it allows them to make off-record transactions so their activities are hard to trace

2. Tax - When otherwise legal business is conducted in cash, it’s possible for business income or employee pay to be undeclared or underreported, meaning the government is losing out on tax revenue. This is huge, and the gov really wants their slice of that cash.

3. Manufacturing and distribution - A minor point, but it is expensive to make physical currency, as well as to keep improving it to prevent forgeries and such. Getting rid of physical currency removes this problem.

I’m sure there are other reasons but those are what came to mind.

Despite these factors, any move to a fully cashless society is controversial, because not everyone is in a position where being fully digital is feasible. It has the worst effects on those who are already marginalised and disadvantaged in society, like the homeless, who may not even be able to open a bank account.

So I think it will be quite a long time until it might happen.

As a developer who has worked on similar systems, I can see why it likely ended up that way. Not justifying it, only understanding it.

In the case of banks, it’s likely that;

• They needed to make 2FA mandatory for all customers, rather than opt-in. This means they needed an MFA method which a person of any technical competency can use. SMS is the “lowest common denominator” here, so they chose it.

• The cost of sending SMS messages is high, but banks are (unsurprisingly) rich and can afford it

It would be great if banks offered better MFA methods, but development time in old-school banks is often ridiculously long as it is a very risk-averse industry that is also slowed down a lot by bureaucracy. It’s likely they would choose something else on the roadmap, and stick with SMS as simply “good enough”

Oh my God, he just ran in

Also paid anti-virus.

As someone who now prefers digital, but grew up with mostly analog, I think I can understand what your teacher was trying to say, and it’s really a difference in how the brain is interpreting time itself.

When your internal mental state of time is represented in numbers, then analog clocks feel awkward and clunky, because to use them you have to look at the clock, think “okay the big hand is here, the little hand is there, so that’s 7:45. School starts at 8, so 15 mins to school”. It’s like having to translate through a foreign language and then back to your own.

For people who use analog clocks almost exclusively, as I did in childhood, then your concept of time actually begins to become directly correlated to the position of the hands themselves. Not the numbers the hands are pointing at, but the shape the hands make on the clock face. I think what your elementary teacher was trying to say is that the clock itself becomes a direct physical representation of the ‘size’ of time.

Someone whose brain is working like that looks at an analog clock and immediately thinks “It’s quarter to school” - without any numbers being involved at all. In fact you could completely remove all numbers and markings from the clock face, and the physical comprehension of time would still function equally as well for that person.

So yeah, I understand why analog is bad for people who don’t like it, but I think I see the appeal for people who do.

Bold of them to assume the door-dasher can afford hospital

I think you are due for a re-watch! It’s great when it’s been a few years and you can enjoy some of the bits you forgot about.

The answer is in the movie. When explaining the Matrix to Neo, Morpheus says: “There are fields, endless fields, where human beings are no longer born, we are grown.”

https://youtu.be/IojqOMWTgv8

Doesn’t specify the exact how, but it’s strongly implied that it is through either cloning or artificial gestation.

To be compliant with standards, USB ports directly on the motherboard must supply at least 500mA each for USB 2 or 900mA each for USB 3.

They can supply more, but that’s the minimum that should be expected.

This.

Conspiracy theories are comforting because they are more pleasant to believe than the truth, which is that we’re all aboard a ship going full steam ahead with nobody at the rudder.

I don’t think so.

I think it just means they seemed like standards which were more prevalent in Europe, meaning support might be better for Euro hardware, or that the (presumably) American market was leaning in a different direction.

I agree as far as the feature set is concerned, but software unfortunately doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

A vulnerability could be discovered that needs a fix.

The operating system could change in such a way that eventually leads to the software not functioning on later versions.

The encryption algorithms supported by the server could be updated, rendering the client unable to connect.

It might be a really long time before any of that happens, but without a maintainer, that could be the end.

It only went ‘badly’ if you believe the users are the people who get to decide.

The reddit redesign wasn’t done to meet the needs of the users - it was done to meet the needs of reddit the corporate entity. And from that perspective it went great.

More uniform look, better marketability, better ad integration and monetisation, all those wonderful things.

They knew the ‘old guard’ would hate it, and they simply didn’t care. They’d have killed it altogether but they needed those users to stick around, because it was the old crowd who provided content and free moderation, and all that great stuff… So they let old.reddit stay, simply to keep people mollified and prevent a riot.

As soon as reddit thinks they don’t need those people any longer, it will be gone, just like the APIs.

It was, six years ago. A non-alcoholic sparkling drink with “metallic effect” apparently

One glass. They know their demographic. But then how are you supposed to share it with Miku your waifu?

The quiet but ever-present whisper of “this place is not for you, you are not welcome here”

A lot of that can be helped by design, but a lot is purely cultural, and driven by perceptions of what others think - or what we believe they think. In Japan for example I always saw loads of people eating out alone in restaurants, it’s just a normal thing to do. But in the west less so. Like the societal perception of the whole point of eating out is to do it with someone. Not just because you want some restaurant food.

So a lot can be overcome just by learning to not give a fuck.

It does give a peek into how other groups must feel though, like those with physical disabilities, as if the world is hostile by design. And it doesn’t need to be. But it is.

It’s a good sermon lol.

Back to the original point about “stages”, the part that really got me thinking was that the person who designed that questionnaire probably didn’t even give it a second glance. They just wrote it, and it felt fine, because to them it seemed like a normal way of thinking.

Same to your thought about there being few events that aren’t targetted at couples and families. When people are in a heteronormtive couple or a family, then they won’t even notice how the whole world seems to be set up in a way that is tailored just for them. It’s perfect for their needs, so why would they see anything deficient with it?

I remember a form one time that asked me “what stage of life are you in”

Options being like Single, Married, Married with Children, etc

The part that made me blink wasn’t so much the options but the use of the word “stage” , as if these things are mandatory steps in life, and by being unmarried I’m somehow still on the starting line.

Incredibly prescriptive of them.