Touchscreens can serve a function. And that’s predominantly when you have your laptop atop your lap. In a cafe or on a plane where even operating your touchpad may be hard for a lack of space (or for me size of gut). On the couch is another scenario like that. If you don’t encounter those situations a lot, don’t get it, especially if it’s more expensive. If you hate fingerprints on any screen, don’t get it. If you’re not sure and money isn’t an issue, take the extra feature.

My gut feeling is not here. It sounds to me like you need specific local legal advice. Search for a local tenant organisation or union, if such a thing exists where you live. They may offer free consultation. If not that, you somehow need to find or befriend a lawyer.

Are other parties in your building also negatively affected? Start reaching out to other tenants who feel the same way.

That sentence of yours I quoted above is a solid red flag for me. Your reply now barely answers the “how” question. You didn’t bother answering the “where” one. Because there are communities that have rules to avoid politics all together or to stay on topic. So proselytising about the corrupt system or terrible companies even in the most polite terms in a community that focuses, say, on cute bunny pictures will naturally get the moderators going. Another possibility is still that you haven’t quite expressed your opinions in the innocuous way you think you have when moderators have stepped in in the past.

Also consider that a lot of the instances that don’t do any or very little moderation tend to be isolated. By which I mean other instances won’t federate with them.

Of the big instances, Lenmy dot ml has a reputation for being moderated in a biased way. So maybe stay away from there. And read the community rules before you post.

That will not ban me for saying my opinion freely.

That depends very much on your opinion and how you choose to express it. Can you give us examples of how and where your freely expressed opinion has run afoul of moderation before?

There is this idea in international politics that the rest of the world should have a say in US elections. Because the outcome inevitably affects us all outside the US. Since we don’t have a say, we still rely on you to be the instrument of checks and balances on your government. And when it is as erratic and boneheaded as your current one, no amount of trade we do with the US should abrogate your responsibilities as the aforementioned instrument. Nor do I think we should stop encouraging protest against the dumb policy of tariffs, which is hurting your own economy as well. Or the end of Roe v Wade. Or the illegal kidnapping of a not much liked head of state. Or the illegal war in Iran. And while this is not exactly the example to follow, the French are rioting for much less these days. It started with bad conditions in schools.

Capitalism works very much with countries’ economies complementing each other. You have the IT sector, high tech military companies, and whisky. Europe has luxury brands, wine, and various niche industries. You buy our shit and we buy yours and then there is no need to produce your shit here as well and vice versa.

That’s a result of decades of a transatlantic relationship that worked in everybody’s favour. We invest in your economy and get security guarantees in return. It’s in a way an extended payoff of the Marshall plan. Your tech sector would be much worse if Europe had built up parallel infrastructures. Which nobody thought necessary because we were all friends. And especially arms deals are often decades in the making. So this “you buy our slop and guns so stop telling us to protest our idiotic government” doesn’t sound quite right to my ears. I think that’s too easy an out.

Rest assured though that Europe will be spending less of its money in the US. The loss of trust as a result of 45/47 is nearly instant. Rebuilding it will take more than a couple of saner administrations. Meanwhile, the US’s purchasing power is shrinking too. Europeans buy military equipment in South Korea and Canada looks to the EU for closer ties. And we haven’t even talked about the bubble yet.

It’s surprising really that you aren’t protesting more.

I don’t have much experience with Collabora but what I have wasn’t great. I’m very much in favour of governments ditching MS for something like Libre Office. But I also know that the formatting errors can be a pain in the røv especially if you have 20 year old Excel sheets full of important information spiked with macros that civil servants who have long since retired made ages ago. It’s minefields within minefields.

So I think many things can be true at the same time. Denmark would like to rely less on American software and services. It was in the interest of the government to communicate that loudly at a time when the mad orange hand was reaching for Greenland (and may do so again because what’s in a treaty?). The Collabora trial could have been an earnest effort that failed for many reasons I don’t have trouble imagining. Or it was a show piece, a signal to the Danish voters as well as American companies. Your contacts may not be as certain any more. It may have led to some increased MS lobbying bts. And this doesn’t mean this is the end of the effort. Just this one, at this point in time.

The big problem is this: success stories of governments switching to something open source are rare. You don’t win elections when people are fed up with long processing times in government services. They’d have to be sufficiently pissed off with the mad orange to tolerate that out of spite. And with the urgency of the Greenland crisis having subsided, the level of pissedoffness will have also declined.

Muse has been downloaded 9 million times in the U.S. and Canada since its launch on September 8, market intelligence company AppMagic, told Rest of World.

I don’t even want to know where they got this figure. Downloads are not the same as users. I would imagine a third is tech influencers and journalists who played with it for a hot minute, produced their piece on it, and uninstalled. The figure is immediately less impressive, isn’t it.

The question of “Western” values over local ones in developing countries is valid. While I would assume the models will be able to learn, I also think the users there will quickly realise that this stuff doesn’t work and stop using it. A similar thing will happen in areas of sketchy internet coverage. People will just not use this crap. And that the vegetable stall on the street market is going to implement an inventory system and publish an agent-friendly website so they can be part of this magnificent technology sounds very unlikely to me. Payment systems, okay. If you can do that on a phone connection. But this much complication? In the PRC in a big city maybe, Burkina Faso maybe not so much.

The agent apocalypse won’t be as bad, I don’t think. There will be plenty of stories of how the Meta agent rather than booking a 10:30am ordered a military drone strike on the nail salon by mistake or something.

The languages are a thing. Even in developed nations like Switzerland or Belgium there are challenges that the “American Intelligence” people have probably not thought about. Brussels is good example where dual infrastructure for Flemish and French speakers exist and really 2.1 language groups live separately and together at the same time. The .1 is all the EU and NATO foreigners in the city plus the odd Belgian German speaker. Booking an appointment at a doctor that doesn’t speak your language through your clever agent isn’t helpful.

I read about some research (and it may have been funded by the socials, I don’t remember) that in a Coke/Pepsi blind test, users preferred algorithmic feeds. Most people do not think too much about what is happening behind the scenes and are happy to receive content they like. The unwashed masses are less concerned with things like privacy or moderation of content. I think there is a strong correlation between people who care about such things and their preference for chronological feeds. And we’re the minority.

An algorithmic feed will always be a better vessel to sell ads. Or in a more conspiratorial sense, to serve you “approved content.” So in the end, it boils down to money. Money prefers algorithms.

It’s precedent-ish. The first court in Munich did the hard work from scratch. The Aachen court copied and pasted their logic into their own ruling. There is a strong chance that for the time being other courts will come up with similar rulings under comparable case conditions. But Google may be waiting for a case where they are not quite as likely to lose if they appeal. Funny shit can still happen, especially if the highest federal court can be convinced to rule on a case like this. So it’s too early to tell if this precedent has more long lasting staying power.

If you get to that position and pet peeves are the first thing you’re thinking about you will have proven the Peter Principle correct. Again.

How would you know the baby was your deceased significant other? What have you sniffed this morning?

I think there are more grey areas in the classification. Just take recreational weed use, which is as legal as smoking cigarettes in some regions but illegal in others. Where does the drug classification start? It’s not as clear to me as you seem to indicate.

Also, the content label doesn’t tell the proprietor of a cinema who can come and see a movie. Do they have to look up a combination of letters to see if a 14yo can go see It? How about something like Trainspotting where there is violence, foul language, and lots of hard drug use. A VLD rating doesn’t indicate anything. But for me the movie isn’t R because for all the pearl clutching it may cause for some people it’s a good promotional film to stay away from heroin.

You can run your system parallel to the existing one. And some of the streamers do that, I think. But for legal reasons, in the US as well as most of Europe, you cannot not give an age limit as well.

I stopped watching Marvel movies because I found the plots virtually nonexistent. And don’t get mad at me, dear reader, if you love them. That’s okay, I’m not taking that away from you. I’m just saying how I felt.

So I don’t know if I would sign on to your theory. I did enjoy a lot of the characters but it didn’t carry an ironman or Thor movie for me.

I would like a sequel of Hail Mary though.

These systems vary by country and you’ll find fault with most of them. They are more often than not rating systems that were introduced to appease a loud group in society, possibly the pious folks were one of those. Society’s natural inclination “to think of the children!” makes these rating systems more about age appropriateness than about clearly labelled content. I can see the logic in your approach to the subject. Logic probably wasn’t the driving force behind introducing labels such as “parental guidance” or “restricted.”

I think it might be easier as a committee to be compelled to come up with an age of people, for whom the content is appropriate, and not argue over labels until they’re blue in the face. Is vaping drug use? How much blood (if any) is required to be labelled violent? Etc. Can this committee agree with a majority vote that 12 year olds probably shouldn’t see this? That’s probably easier.

Time keeping developed as a local phenomenon. We are stuck with this dumb 24-hour clock. People don’t want to have to get up at 22:00 in Vanuatu to go to work when it should be 7:00 AM because it’s dawn outside. Time keeping stays local. Unless you live in the West of the PRC.

GMT has been rebranded UTC to remove the reference to Greenwich and whose acronym doesn’t stand for anything so not to annoy the French. NATO uses Zulu time, which is UTC, regardless of where they are on the planet.

We’d improve the situation if we all just agreed to get rid of daylight savings everywhere. If it wasn’t for that, the UTC +/- whatever would work much better. Alas, politics.

Dank eines netten Mannes deines Faches lispel ich nicht mehr.

Viel Erfolg!

Dath hatht du thuper gemacht!

Dass Holmirmalneflaschebier Gasherd fest im Putinschen Rektum steckt, ist doch nun wahrlich keine Überraschung mehr. Er hat sich gerade noch in den Aufsichtsrat eines russischen Supermarkts berufen lassen.

Der Mann ist über 80. Den kriegen wir nicht mehr hin.

Meine Oma wollte nicht aus ihrer Wohnung ausziehen. Obwohl sie auf den Rollstuhl angewiesen war und es keinen Fahrstuhl gab. Wie viele alte Leute fahren mit 80 noch Auto und sollten das nicht mehr? Und Gerd fährt halt nach Moskau.

Streicht dem Mann die Bezüge. Wenn er über den Jordan geht, das kleinste aller Staatsbegräbnisse oder besser noch gar keins. Und dann können wir auch aufhören, uns jedes Mal so laut über Opa zu ärgern.

Am Ende bringt diese Abgrenzungsempörung auch nix. Es ändert nix an der Tatsache, dass er mal Kanzler war. Und leider seinerzeit besser darin als Fritze heute!

As a starter, Duolingo isn’t bad. Sure, it’s mostly slop at this point so keep that in mind. And only stick with it until you realise the mistakes.

When I hear “I’m seeing X everywhere,” I suspect you might be Baader-Meinhoffing.