Posts by Danie 17 publicly visible posts • joined 7 May 2020
I buy for US Amazon fairly often to import into my own country, and Amazon has always shown the shipping and additional taxes/duties as a separated calculation added to the price. Does this mean I'll also no longer see that?
I would have though, as far as the US goes, that displaying price breakdowns is a form of free speech protected by law? It is much like donating money to political campaigns is free speech. Why would price breakdowns be any different.
Always easy with Facebook, Instagram, X, etc as the government can fine them. So what happens with decentralised Mastodon, Friendica, Diaspora, Peertube, etc where there are hundreds of servers all over the world - the legal accountability here is being placed on the hosting party. With Peer to Peer networks it gets even more complicated as there is no central hosting service at all - think of Nostr, SSB, RetroShare, Aether, etc - your own computer or phone is the host.
The world has changed, and I'm still interested to see how brands and governments are going to catch up. Many kids today have no interest in these legacy platforms apart from maybe TikTok, but decentralised Loops has just launched as an alternative to TikTok.
If proof of age over 16 is going to mean having to produce government IDs to prove that to each and every network, I see a major privacy risk as there is no way that information can be kept safe anywhere online.
Kids will go where they can, so I really don't think parents can just sit back and abdicate their role. Of course, with Australia, they could just add a gov warning sign on every lawn outside houses where kids live. I gather the warning signs are quite a big thing.
It would be far better to block the sale of ANY user data. If it is American companies collecting and selling user data, this is the chance for the USA to do the right thing globally, and not just think of itself. This is a problem all countries face, and they cannot enforce change within the USA borders.
The USA has previously accused China of doing things that the USA themselves do (I'm thinking of the most recent CIA disinformation project from 2017 I think it was, inside China). Countries like Australia censor part of the Internet, but the USA is not shouting about that, and I wonder how Microsoft manages that there? I see it is, one person's moderation is another person's censorship (pretty much like one country's terrorist is another country's freedom fighter).
I may not agree with the censorship that China applies, but we should be objective about it. I just think we really need to view these issues at a global level.
I really loved Authy's cross-platform sync, and quickly moved off Google 2FA to Authy. But this move is probably just what I needed to finally move all my 2FA across to Bitwarden (which does passkeys too). So 90% through the manual slog of recreating my 61 2FA logins... on target for Authy's cut-off date. Sorry, but I do 99% of my browsing on desktop so a mobile-only app is just not going to cut it for me.
Well our government (jn South Africa) could follow though on its promise back in 2007 to go open source, or finish the 10-year eGov project that they started (self-built with open source). It would likely cost a lot less than SAP or Oracle, and keep all the money on-shore with local businesses. Estonia has done it, India has also done it (and has shared their code), so why can't we? It just takes some willpower and a sense of commitment.... Buying into a foreign owned cloud service is only going to cost more and more, and you'll have very little you can ever extract and use elsewhere (equals vendor lock-in).
Point is there was a contract and it is usually based on per CPU/core licensing and if you add more servers, upgrade, or move to a private cloud then you obviously owe Oracle more money. That is not unknown, and if the case, then Eskom is being negligence (at worst maybe criminal). Oracle can't claim amounts that were not itemised in its contracts. So really I can only see Eskom at fault here. Everyone knows the Orcale, Microsoft, etyc pricing is nota fixed cost - it varies by client usage and $/R exchange rate. It'sd up to Eskom to manage that, not Oracle.
Yes the choice of Oracle is another point entirely. I've always maintained that where SA governmnet does not have extra R100's of millions they should ratehr have been using something like free and open source Odoo ERP software, and rather paid local companies in Rands to implement and support it (there were platinum partners in SA when I last looked). That would have meant Eskom could never have been held to ransome, or vendor lock-in.
But no, it seems the tax payers pockets are just endlessly deep and we want to pay US$ subscriptions annually based on amount of usage...
I know this frustration as I used to always make notes in meetings and distribute them afterwards - but they were my notes and I just noted the essences of things said. It was very quick for me to just fix formatting and then mail them out.
I would hate to do minutes mainly because they chew up so much time later on getting it all into minute format etc. Problem with many minutes is that they try record everything said. Actually minutes should justy be a summary after an agenda point is finished, as to what action will be taken, and actually the chairperson should summariuse that for the minute taker. More than that, you are taking seconds not minutes.
So how did I get out of minute taking.... Sometimes I would chair a meeting, but I always made sure I was the most involved person talking and said I can't really take minutes if I'm doing all the talking. Other thing was I worked wioth a lot of clienst and made sure our business agreements stated that whomever hoste dthe meeting would have the minutes recored. So most of my meetings were held at client premises and they provided the person to take minutes. I rationalised this by saying I coulkd not bring my non-existaent admin person to a client office just to take minutes.
But despite all the above I always took my own notes for 100's of meetings and the main reason why was I could not remember always who said what, as minute takers invariably missed the critical points - even humans, especially those who are plain admin, did not always follow the context and nuances of the issues being discussed.
Yes very likley why we are seeing the likes of Peer-to-Peer networks such as Aether, Utopia, SSB, and numerous others growing and growing. Looks like citizens the world over are a step ahead of their governmnets and even Big Tech. On all three of these I only see ordinary citizens wanting to talk about coffee, art, programming, sialing, etc. Nothing subversive about it. But they are sick and tired of being the product and it proves you really don't need big centralised server based services.
I buy quite a few games on Steam regardless of whether they are Linux specific or not, mainly because yes we have Proton now. So the point is I appear as a Windows purchaser on many ocassions and there shoudkl be some way of flagging that as a "Linux user" purchase. That goodness we have the freedomn to buy and use many Windiows games on Linux. I love detailed simulator games and apart from X-Plane and a few others, there are not many very good Linux only games in that genre.
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