The simplicity of the Slate interior is fantastic. They developed a screenless touch screen that you can rotate without even looking at them. I wish I were in the market for this type of vehicle.

According to the open letter those donations to Organic Maps were used for a personal holiday. Along with everything else in there, I’m not using it any longer.

Small shoe.

My perception of Proton was never that users would be kept safe from governments, but that users would be kept away from advertisers.

Is Signal equivalent in scale to iMessage or WhatsApp? Does it come preinstalled on devices as well? All three are tools, I agree, however one of these things is not like the others. The average toolbox will have Phillips and Robertson screwdrivers, but not a Torx type.

Signal takes at least a grain of interest to even get a user to install it, whereas iMessage is already there ready to go and that suits most people just fine. The question I asked was based on my incorrect assumption that centred in the Venn diagram of people whom bother to use Signal, read a technology forum, and look at an article about backups, there would also be an overlap with people that already had a backup solution in place.

Your Marlinspike comment notwithstanding, thank you for demonstrating that I was wrong. I should have remembered most people just want to drive a car, not concern themselves with how or why the wheels go round.

It does strike me as funny that some fixate on the ‘why bother’ question when viewing what amounts to be another person’s hobby.

Well my point was not that every random maintenance task under the sun gets done and ticked off a mile long list.

It seems a reasonable guess that a person whose hobby is building custom mechanical keyboards probably does keep it clean. I figured people using an encrypted messaging system with backups enabled would probably go to the trouble of ensuring those backups didn’t live in one place.

From your comment and a few others, it’s evident I was wrong in this thought. Among other things, it seems some people don’t want backups at all, which is a bit surprising to me. That’s why I asked the question.

Are people not copying their backup off their device periodically?

Personally I’d find it useful to create backups by year so the process doesn’t take twenty minutes and wouldn’t create a massive backup file.

A couple years ago I had to make an effort of sending gallery links instead of sharing images and video directly through Signal since my backup file had grown so large. It’s a bit arduous.

I didn’t give the privacy concern much thought in the moment, mainly thinking how useless and poorly designed those apps usually are, but I do agree.

Considering it now, I do have loyalty cards in my company vehicle for certain things, primarily fuel, and those of course remain in that vehicle as they serve no other purpose. Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal. Though ideally I’d imagine a few dedicated handheld terminals kept in store for redundancy purposes.

Speaking of redundancy, you’re right about paying in cash. Perhaps as easy as a ‘cash’ button and it would send the purchase total to a customer service desk. Around here, all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets and gift cards and such.

Though it would be funny to see these handheld terminals have a compartment to accept notes and coins haha.

The only solution for that which I see is taking photos of the labels for every product taken off the shelf, but that’s quite the imposition obviously. Trouble is there are no laws guiding these practices, and the result is going to be quite the mess for customers to understand.

In my opinion, the best purchasing experience for this type of shopping is using a handheld device with which you both scan the product as you take it off the shelf, and also process payment on your way to the exit. No cashier lines, and even better, no more unloading and repacking of your items just to purchase them. From the shelf into your bag, only back out again in your kitchen.

On another note, it boggles my mind to see the square footage used by all these self checkout machines when these terminal systems exist. Sadly I’ve never used one in North America. This is an aspect of shopping that could make me loyal to a single vendor. I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.

I wonder at what point does a massive series of rocket engines power up and fly the magic kingdom to a market with a viable customer base.

I was referencing digital price labels that retailers are installing.

This technology is being touted by the companies putting them in place to be a cost saving measure as staff no longer need to print new labels and manually replace them for products on the shelf. This is true in that it is a benefit of digital labelling, however there are many other usage options that could be implemented after installation.

• alter prices around lunch hour for ready meals and snacks at retailers in walking distance to secondary schools
• automatic increases for products being purchased more rapidly than historical averages to capitalize on a yet unknown trend
• increases simply as stock begins running low

Imagine in a few years when this technology is combined with network snooping of phone identification, loyalty rewards card purchase histories, and automatic buying of customer information from data brokers, all to create a profile that predicts when a person would be likely to be menstruating and the moment they walk in the store, the hygienic products they buy every month raise in price by 30%.

It’s a bleak future I’m afraid.

2026: Major grocers found using customer heart rate to personalise prices - higher the pulse, higher the price

I cannot wait for the status quo politicians around the world to parrot this headline as a talking point.

This is a good showcase of how a few individuals can leverage power to fend off massive interests. For the good of the public even, in this instance.

Based solely on your comment, I’m looking forward to watching a scene where Christian Bale goes around Wall Street collecting mugs in The Big Short 2: Polymer Boogaloo.

I’ve seen some of the photos of people driving American-sized pickup trucks around Europe and I hope they get outlawed. Unfortunately, Europe and Asia do have so many more options - sometimes even by American companies much to my annoyance.

I occasionally look into getting a Kei car of some sort. Though it’s not really practical for me. Maybe one day, by the time a sub five inch flagship phone is developed perhaps.

Small vehicle sales represent less than a fifth of the market. Major manufacturers have ceased production of sedans and hatchbacks in favour of larger platform SUVs and pickup trucks.

I realise that vehicles aren’t really the focus here, but the smartphone market isn’t too dissimilar in certain ways. The major manufacturers have discontinued their smaller for factor devices citing ‘sales’, but those devices cost nearly what a larger one did so it’s reasonable that consumers would opt for the bigger screen, especially when it’s typically coupled with a larger battery and superior camera.

Also similar between these two markets, if you look overseas, or at older used models, or make any of a variety of compromises, you can find something if you’re determined. Or you don’t find something and just deal with the giant phone that sticks half out your pocket and you can’t sit down without removing it.

Personally, I’m enjoying watching the advances in folding phones. They are approaching Westworld standards pretty quick. Trouble of course will be when they get there, it’ll cost the same as a car and at that point it better unfold some wheels too.

Similar to vehicles, smaller phones probably would sell just fine.

The issue would be that not many people would buy a phone 2/3 the size unless it was also 2/3 the price. Even if the manufacturing of such a device was 2/3 the cost (it wouldn’t be), the bottom line for the manufacturer would be same number of devices sold, but 1/3 less money.

Companies don’t do less money.

Yes I suppose, just like anything, a nuance here would be whether or not we expect a person of such political authority to be able to have weekends at all.

On one hand, they’re still a person working a job and no one should be working 365 days a year On the other, the societal cost, in terms of income tax covering travel and security costs, of having a President that travels every weekend is a bit much.

If the President was only golfing on the weekends, and wasn’t charging the government to golf at his own clubs, then this whole thing of him taking leisure every weekend would be a harder thing to argue against without getting into that whole administration work life balance discussion.

Not for nothing, but the headline of the article is talking about time spent golfing, and so is neon_nova’s comment.

The thing the President did isn’t the problem, or really even the frequency. The problem is the cost to the taxpayer.

‘20,000 American’s pay for President’s golf habit’ would be a better title.