It seems you don’t see the value in having one integrated provider for everything. Other people clearly do.
Also if there were GOOD European alternatives to those google service people would use them, but there simply aren’t. Low salaries and terrible regulations are to blame.
I'm not sure many people go upload on youtube because they already had a gmail, and a small enterprise loosing all their documents because they got their home made ads copystriked by drive by DMCA trolls also doesn't sound like a great integration feature...
Honestly, what, beyond the account infrastructure, is integrated in googles consumer products?
Do you understand the difference between US vs EU markets? As in: demographics issues, language issues, product targeting issues?
There are no good European alternatives due to a conflation of these issues, not just because of regulations, that's such a naive (or willingly ignorant) take on a complex issue.
How would European tech companies start and compete against FAANG right now? Given that the EU market is quite fragmented between demographics and language? How can an European tech company avoid being acqui-hired or acqui-killed by one of the current massive tech giants?
If you don't develop your arguments of what kind of regulation holds EU tech companies back and posit that against the issues I mentioned then I can't really trust you understand the problem and differences between markets that give benefits to the US economy, as it always had, it's a massive and more homogeneous economy than the EU.
Let's compare US vs China tech as that seems more of an appropriate comparison from the baseline.
> Now you know which websites are willing to absolutely ruin your experience just to abuse you.
Which is absolutely all of them. I guess the legislators wanted the popups to be annoying so publishers would be forced not to import their party scripts. Turns out publishers can’t stay open without the ads that pay their bills which means popups are the new normal, to the point where when I see a website that doesn’t have popups I suppose they are just in violation of the law. Thanks EU!
No, the legislators didn't want the pop-ups to be annoying. They didn't even require pop-ups.
Who wants the pop-ups to be annoying and riddled with dark patterns are the ones implementing it, exactly to cause this kind of reaction on you so you start hating the law, not the ones who are trying their best to skirt around it, to find the loopholes and abuse them. To make your experience as poor as possible while being compliant so you will focus your hatred on the ones who wrote the laws.
This is part of their game, make the experience miserable to people start getting angry at politicians.
If you knew the law then you wouldn't say how bloody stupid it is.
It isn't perfect, at all, but no laws are. This is a major milestone for the discussion of data privacy and pushed the world into that, it needs to be worked, of course, but that's how laws work, they take time to evolve.
As someone who has had to work on several GDPR compliance initiatives I don't think it's bloody stupid at all, no matter how much more workload it has created for all the teams I helped to implement it. It has quirks but it's in no way bloody stupid.
I'd prefer if you can list your arguments for being bloody stupid as just stating that does not develop any kind of healthy discussion, it's your opinion and judgment of value, with no supporting argument. Good luck with that, victim-blaming is corporate-bootlicking.
- Opt-in and opt-out should be equally easy and accessible.
Tell me how a company who would be trying to be ethical and follow this spirit would come up with the current pop-ups.
Don't blame the legislation for allowing dark patterns to be used due to loopholes or failure of prediction all possible clever tricks to circumvent the spirit described above.
It hasn't unconditionally failed, the pop-ups are still there and I opt-out of every single one of them.
Except one: schneidersladen.de - they follow exactly the spirit of the law, I put the bar there.
> 'National Geographic' is not evil, they are struggling and most of these sites are not giant entities with well-staffed experts.
There's a very simple solution: respect my privacy and don't store or sell data about me. If you only use cookies necessary for running the site, then you don't need to do anything.
If you must track me, then do as sibling commenter said. If you store privacy-invading data about me, then you damn well better know the laws and if you don't, then sorry, you can't track me on your website.
This position is a somewhat naive because it does not following through with the consequences of the actions: you missed the part where there is no National Geographic - and you don't get any content - in the most ideal scenarios from the user's perspective.
The business model of the internet is advertising, as of today, that requires cookies, which by the way, don't represent material harm.
Also - you're specific view is in no way representative of the population at large. 'Most people' would rather remain completely private at the same time, they would forgo at least some degree of privacy for the option.
Given the choice of a:
a) No content
b) Constant popups
c) The previous imperfect norm but where people can get their content without hassle ...
They would chose option 'c' - hands down.
The effect of legislation is to create popup hassles for individuals that they never read - and to provide no real material improvement for people.
What they could have don instead.
i) Orchestrated cookie-free advertising exchanges and solutions
ii) Created privacy 'categories' and relevant rules and symbols, like movie ratings - and a symbol could be placed o prominently on the site so consumers have a quick and easy mechanism to know where they stand.
iii) worked with other nations and groups to arrive at consistent standards. With Canada, Australia, Japan on board, it might be very well possible to convince a Biden-lend USA to buy into some kind of standard.
What we have now is not pragmatic and it's ill conceived.
This would all go away if users were will to fork over 5 cents to read an article.
>I don’t know how many people this bug affects (anyone with 200-300 icons is hitting a modest version of this, and it gets progressively worse with more) and I have no power to fix it. So, I filed a bug. I am not hopeful that it will be fixed. My last quadratic-in-Windows bug has had zero comments since it was filed a few months ago.
What’s the way to report a bug in Windows? The closest thing I know is the feedback hub which is an unmoderated public forum full of spam and dunces
The phrase "I filed a bug" links to a bug database which Microsoft has started to use for performance bugs, especially developer facing. I have been using that quite a bit.
They prefer that you use Feedback Hub for most bug reports but...
If you’re on Twitter you will see 99.9% of tech people spend all day posting left wing political takes. Just a bit of counterbalance is not going to hurt you lol
Those are struct names though. So they wouldn't be in there. They did share some headers with the MTA developers though and that's where we got bRenderScorched from. i think the body part name is ours though.
Definitely. Early GTA Online was heavily inspired by MTA game modes.
For example, the races on crazy roads floating in the sky was a hallmark of MTA. It's far too abstract to think R* came up with that idea independently of the many years of prior art in MTA.
It's a shame they only copied the game modes and not the architecture, as GTA Online's biggest downfall is the P2P networking.
The truth is that the future of Armenia is either with Russia or with Azerbaijan, a Muslim country. It’s their choice, but I know what I would choose myself.
Azerbaijan is also a small country, although it's correctly painted as the bigger and richer of the enemies in this conflict. Additionally, Azeris and Armenians hate each other. So Azerbaijan is too small, weak and culturally different to subsume Armenia.
The big powers in the region are Russia, Turkey and Iran. If you must argue that Armenia should pick a big power to cosy up to, those are the options. Turkey is likely committed to Azerbaijan, but Iran and Russia are willing to play both sides.
Pursuing closer links with Europe and the EU is a fourth option. As the article points out, Armenia has historic links to Europe (although in the same paragraph it concedes that the strongest of those are to Russia, not the Western countries...) and this would be more attractive to Armenians. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much to offer the EU. It's poor and geographically isolated and the EU, which doesn't have unified armed forces, isn't interested in projecting military power overseas.
How is their future with Azerbaijan where killing Armenians is something they are proud of.
Gurgen Margaryan was killed by an Azeri in Hungary. Once he was extradited to Azerbaijan he was released, promoted and got a big pay. Now he's a hero there.
That would require getting a handle on economics, corruption and political mismanagement. It would take a decade or more of change. They could align themselves more with the EU, but remember: The EU cannot, AND WILL NOT, go to war over a small asian country, regardless of how it align it self with the union.
So Armenia would risk provoking it’s neighbors, with no way of defending it self.
So, yeah, the EU would need to grow a massive set of balls and build an army large enough to keep Russia away, and station troops in all EU friendly states bordering Russia. I’d call that a 2050 plan at best.
Turkey is a small, weak country compared to the EU and was able to send significant help to Azerbaijan.
It's not for the EU to be scared. They just need to setup camp in Armenia, then others will not dare attack.
The problem is to indeed grow a pair and show some backbone instead of always being scared and weak. Again, the EU is (or can be) a massive power that others, including Russia, will not cross.
Specifically, show me one country in the EU whose internal politics could sustain losing significant numbers of personnel in a proxy war with the second largest military in NATO.
The EU, it’s member countries and it general population have no grasp of the size, power and potential influence of the European Union and there’s almost zero interest in exploring it.
As a friend of mine suggested, one of the better routes the EU could take is to look to Switzerland and estabilish a confederation, with a single military, forereign policy and currency, but leave everything to the member states.
Also if there were GOOD European alternatives to those google service people would use them, but there simply aren’t. Low salaries and terrible regulations are to blame.