I’m not defending this action from Microsoft, but for most people, they buy a Microsoft product and then happily use it for years, none the wiser to any of Microsoft’s other nonsense happening in the background.

A: gets scammed by company

B: You’re so stupid, you should have known that company was going to scam you.

Yes I think I saw the guy who did that, he ran into the washroom and can be found above the sink

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That doesn’t prove anything. There’s no proof that the person currently using it is the same person as the person who created the account.

By the way, you might also notice this argument also works against age verification systems where the user’s age is verified only once. Unless you intend to check their identity every single time they log in.

Age verification is just a ham-fisted way for the state to try to take over a role that should be exercised by parents. Parental controls exist, people!

Governments don’t hate privacy intrinsically. They just don’t think it’s important. Violating privacy using mass surveillance has no visible downside to the uninformed public. Policy makers just notice that destroying privacy makes it easier to catch cybercriminals and decide it’s a worthwhile trade off. You probably disagree with that. But there are far too many people who just go along with it.

I know someone who fits that description, but when he applied, the Pokémon Company dug up his past and denied his application. His wife was approved though, so he’s fine with it.

But the Pokémon Company has no way to differentiate between a genuinely changed person and someone who has a seedy past and is still seedy. So they err on the safe side. At the location I run events at, some casual events are between 50-80% children so I understand why.

I am a TCG judge, but there are also judges for the video game and Pokémon Go. I can only answer why the TCG has judges.

Sometimes, the rules present some ambiguity, so a judge is needed to resolve disputes. There are also niche edge cases which not all people are aware of (for example, you generally can’t play a card that searches your deck if you have no cards in your deck, unless the card has other effects), so it’s helpful to have a rules expert on hand.

Some tournaments have significant prizes on the line. I’ve reffed events where the total prize pool was hundreds of dollars. When that happens, inevitably, there are disputes and people make mistakes. Judges are there to enforce the tournament rules and serve as the official arbiters for disputes. Sometimes, people inadvertently break the rules, by playing cards they’re not supposed to or by forgetting to perform a required action. When that happens, a judge steps in to resolve. And sometimes, disputes are just petty adults acting like children, like complaining that your opponent did not shuffle their deck throroughly enough (but sometimes we do observe actual children not shuffling their deck well enough, but they’re children so we just go and shuffle for them)

Judges also deal with disciplinary problems too. For example, we have the ability to issue penalties to players for rules infractions or disqualify or ban them for being disruptive. These penalties are recorded on the Pokémon Company’s player database and if a player gets kicked out of too many events (especially prestigious ones like a regional tournament, North America/European Internationals, or the world championship), they eventually may be prevented from attending events.

It’s fortunately never happened at any event I’ve worked at, but an examples of some things that would get a player disqualified would be failing a deck legality check unless the player fixes it immediately, cursing excessively, annoying other players and refusing to stop when asked, being caught cheating, wearing inappropriate clothing/not exercising good personal hygiene, or drinking alcohol or being drunk/high.

The test is 100% multiple choice, so I have no idea. It’s graded automatically and if you fail, you know immediately and you can retake it in a week.

You apply online, take an exam, and pass a background check. Then you go and obtain at least one of the certs, which are just online courses.

It’s not difficult, but to pass the exam you do need to study the provided manuals and rulebooks.

So, I volunteer at what, according to the Pokémon Company, is the highest-attendence Play! Pokémon location in the region.

While it is indeed mostly adults, we do get several children at our events. Specifically, the store runs both competitive and casual Pre-release events and casual ones tend to be around 80% children (of around 30 attendees).

Okay, so I am an actual Pokémon Professor, let me provide some context behind this:

Pokémon Professors are people who are certified by the Pokémon Company to run officially-sanctioned Pokémon tournaments and other events. Local game shops and other events venues depend on the presence of a Pokémon Professor to ensure their events actually have official status. Being an official Play! Pokémon location which runs officially-sanctioned events increases the amount of product that wholesale distributors will send to your store, meaning local game stores rely on Professors running events to maintain their supply of product from the Pokémon Company.

Pokémon Professors get certain powers to officiate events depending on their rank and the certs they possess. For example, people who have the Judge cert can act as referees making official rulings and people with the Organiser cert can “sanction” an event and run it using the Pokémon Company’s official tournament software (a piece of shit called “TOM”), causing it to become an official Play! Pokémon event where the results are recorded on the Pokémon Company’s database. Sanctioned tournaments also appear on the Pokémon Company’s tournament finder website which can drive a lot of customers to your event. Especially for the larger privately-hosted tournaments (League Challenges and League Cups), you need to have a Professor sanction it for people to actually come and you need at least one Professor on hand to officiate it.

Being a Pokémon Professor is sometimes profitable. Most Professors are volunteers or work for local game stores, but getting a high rank and accumulating certs can result in very lucrative gigs. For example, serving as a judge during a regional tournament is a paid role and judges get compensated somewhere between US$1200-1500 (worth of easily-sellable Pokémon product) for one weekend of work. Even the pack of promotional cards that they give Professors with every new set is worth hundreds of dollars. And some local game stores who don’t have an in-house Pokémon Professor will contract it out to one they find locally.

And because Pokémon is a game which attracts lots of children, the Pokémon Company, very justifiably, requires a squeaky-clean background check. Any single blemish more serious than a speeding ticket, and you’re out.

Only place on Earth that would cheer the arrival of a 7.25 USD minimum wage

Contabo is cheap but has some weird quirks. I pay about five euros a month. My server got mysteriously rolled by two days and they denied anything happened to it. I restored from backups but it was odd.

Linux Mint is a good choice but it doesn’t come with a GNOME flavour by default. You can install it yourself if you want, though.

I moved to Fedora after leaving Ubuntu. Worked fine for me, but you’ll have to re-train your muscle memory for some terminal commands. sudo apt install becomes sudo dnf install and rpm is a little different from dpkg. Other than that, with the Dash to Dock extension, Fedora feels exactly the same as Ubuntu to me.

We already have that. In many parts of the developed world, you can get a roof over your head at a homeless shelter free of charge, and soup kitchens will give you enough calories to prevent you from starving to death. You’ll just have to accept a much lower standard of living.

I agree with you on that. Intelligence isn’t a stat point that someone is assigned at character creation. It’s the result of the educational opportunities and support that they had access to growing up.

I don’t think anyone has ever argued that nobody would ever be productive without pay. The concern is that not enough people would choose to be productive if they didn’t have to.

There seems to be a correlation between doing productive things for fun and higher intelligence and education. There is also a strong correlation between higher intelligence and holding left-wing views. Hence, the people posting these types of memes think that everyone would do what they would (be productive for fun). But ask some more… average intelligence people, and you will find that they’ll tend to say if they could just chill and play video games or scroll TikTok all day, that’s all they would do.

Could we continue to feed people even if work was made optional? At our level of the tech tree, probably. But people don’t just want to be fed, they like having computers and video games and houses and running water, all of which take a stupendous amount of labour to create and maintain, and I’m just not convinced that we could subside off volunteer labour for any society bigger than a few hundred people (which, not coincidentally, also tends to be about the maximum size of a left-wing commune)

In general, we accept that the Government already knows who you are, how old you are, and where you live. That’s already a given. The purpose of a zero-knowledge age verification scheme is to allow a third party (not the Government) to be confident that a person is an adult, without being given any additional information or being able to deduce any additional information from what they’re given. So essentially, they get only 1 bit of information: whether the user is an adult (true/false). In practice, a perfect system is not possible, since the fact that you receive a response also means you get the answer to related questions, like whether the user possesses a Government-issued ID (obviously “true” if they can successfully complete the verification).

So, here’s how such a scheme might work. There are many possible implementations.

In the United States, we have (optional) digital ID cards. These are added to one’s digital wallet in a similar manner to payment cards and can be used for things like buying alcohol, getting through airport security, and driving. This digital infrastructure can be re-used.

1. An organisation which wants to perform digital identity verification generates a cryptographic key pair and registers the public key with a Government server ahead of time. The public key is published to a Government-run public keyserver.
2. A website who wants to verify a user’s age sends a verification request to a Government server, digitally signed with their private key. The server responds with a request ID, which is a random, but unique, string of characters.
3. The website provides this string to the user. The user copies the string.
4. The user opens their digital wallet, selects their ID card, and then opens the age verification feature. The user pastes the request ID into their digital wallet, which fetches information about the request from the Government server. Because the request which the request ID is associated with was signed using the organisation’s private key, the Government can tell the user who initiated the request.
5. The user is asked to confirm/deny the age verification request. If the user confirms the request, then a biometric will be required to access their private key (these are stored in the device’s keystore), sign the approval response, and then sent that response to the Government server. The Government server checks that the signature is valid and tied to the key associated with that ID before marking the verification request as completed.
6. After confirming, the user returns to the website and clicks a button which says “I’ve completed the verification.” The website then queries the request ID with the Government server (again, signing the request with their private key). The Government server responds with “completed” if the user has accepted the request, or “not completed” if the user has either not yet accepted the request or denied it.

It’s not a guarantee, but generally, digital ID systems live on the phone of one person only and require a screen lock to use. You’re right though, that there is nothing preventing someone else from borrowing another’s identity.