But isn’t that part of making the reader explore and experience the world of magic, just like Harry is? There’s no narrator here who already knows everything, you’re experiencing the stories through the eyes of Harry, and only really know what he knows. In that context, it doesn’t really make sense to have these early clues. The reader can’t anticipate everything because Harry can’t either.
Magic in general is just a plot device that can do whatever the author needs it to do.
I’m pretty sure Olivander already mentions when Harry chooses his wand that it’s basically a twin of Voldemort’s, and in the subsequent books it’s explained that that + Lily’s magic is causing plenty of weird things to happen, including what happens in book 4. Sure, the exact reason why it happens is still “magic” but that goes for most magic systems if you delve deep enough.
Mods can take subs private temporarily if they notice brigading. They can also contact admins who could use other tools at their disposal. Not fun, but effective.
Admins and mods have other tools to deal with those issues. But given that Reddit is a corporation it will likely also remove content that are in a murky area rules-wise, or given the current political climate selectively apply the rules. That creates a risk for redditors who try to use the site legitimately as well.
What Reddit believes to be “bad content” has historically been a little dubious. So I can understand people are apprehensive about this.
Pretty sure the reasoning behind that was given in book 1.
I think the biggest issue is that if you already need to separate payments, returns, shipping, etc… you’re left with a shop that also advertises products for other shops, possibly competitors. Then the question becomes… why bother federating at all?
I think it’d be better to set up a FOSS shopping platform, eg something that competes with WooCommerce or the likes. That’s significantly easier from a financial and legal perspective, and I think it’s an easier sell to actual merchants (why pay a license for that shit, use this one for freeee). Then once you have that running, you could think about optional federation as an addition to an already well-functioning platform.
I work in the IT department for a fairly large payment service provider. I can tell you now that you seem to be vastly underestimating both the financial aspect of this as well as several legal aspects.
Federation would almost certainly have to be opt-in rather than opt-out. I don’t think you’re going to pass KYC checks for any PSP if it’s opt-out, the risk of someone (ever so briefly) selling illegal goods through your website is too great otherwise. Stripe would just shut down your account (if they even let you open it), PayPal probably won’t let you open it at all.
Selling goods from other sites through your own, makes you liable for any returns, warranty claims etc… Simply “passing these on” isn’t going to cut it. If the other site disagrees with the customer claim, you are on the hook for it, because it was sold through your website.
The financial logistics aspect here is really complex. If you’re going to process payments on behalf of another site, you have to deal with reconciliation. After reconciliation you have to the send the money to the other shop, incurring additional (sometimes surprisingly sizeable) fees. And coming from someone who deals with (automated) reconciliation on a daily basis, every payment method does it differently and they all find extremely creative ways to mess up your systems. And that includes unannounced changes, mistakes, random unexplained fees, failure to deliver settlement files, etc…
How do you deal with the risk of scam instances? E.g. instance A tells instance B that a product was sold and the payment was processed. B sends it out, but it turns out the customer was the owner of A, and there was no payment at all. B just lost a product with very little chance of getting it back.
Then there’s practical aspects. How do you deduplicate products in search? Or will you have dozens of listings for the exact same product?
The only remotely viable way I see this working is if only search is actually federated. Once you are on a product page, you can only pay using the payment page of the instance that has the product. You won’t be able to pay for products of multiple instances at once, and you might lose some unified styling. But at least that approach has a chance of passing KYC and deals with all the legal issues regarding returns/warranties etc…, and it reduces the scam risk because you’re in charge of your own payments. But at that point, you’ve only federated product search and nothing else, and then as a consumer you might as well just Google it instead.
I appreciate you have experience in running a business, but running a marketplace, especially a very complicated one, is really not like running a usual business.
I feel like this is far too dismissive for a comment that was in my eyes fairly constructive. He correctly pointed out that one of Amazon’s main selling points is their whole logistics division. A federated website doesn’t have that. So either:
Maybe you could actually address the core of his criticism instead of outright dismissing it.
Getting an SSL protocol error on that link.
I don’t mind opposing views. I do mind views that say some of my family members or some of my friends should kill themselves. I have no business on a platform that allows such hateful conduct, end of story.
It’s a matter of basic decency and respect.
I honestly don’t mind the pre-movie ads too much. Usually there’s not that many, it quickly moves on to other movie trailers (which I don’t mind knowing about) and then you just get the full movie without any ads whatsoever. You can always just arrive 10 minutes later and skip most of the ads anyway.
Netflix ads can kiss my ass though. Jellyfin to the rescue!
Yes. This controller was specifically created for Apple and it’s a proprietary chip.
No other manufacturer uses it, and thus no other manufacturer has these security flaws. Apple didn’t rely on existing, tried and tested controllers but had to make something proprietary and ‘special’, and the fucked up in doing so.
what happened when the EU forced apple to move to USB-C.
Apple messed up is what happened. None of the other manufacturers appears to have this issue, despite the same legislation applying to them.
This is solely on Apple fucking up.
I’m surprised to hear GIMP crashed on you, I don’t think I’ve ever had it crash on me.
Yes, by allowing you to download the video file to the browser. This snippet of legal terms didn’t really reinforce any of your points.
But it actually is helpful for mine. In legalese, downloading and storing a file actually falls under reproduction, as this essentially creates an unauthorized copy of the data if not expressly allowed. It’s legally separate from downloading, which is just the act of moving data from one computer to another. Downloading also kind of pedantically necessitates reproduction to the temporary memory of the computer (eg RAM), but this temporary reproduction is most cases allowed (except when it comes to copyrighted material from an illegal source, for example).
In legalese here, the “downloading” specifically refers to retrieving server data in an unauthorized manner (eg a bot farm downloading videos, or trying to watch a video that’s not supposed to be out yet). Storing this data to file falls under the legal definition of reproduction instead.
except: (a) as expressly authorized by the Service
Can you read?
No, that’s “Download to file” or “Download and save”. Just because some people like to refer to downloading and saving as just “downloading”, doesn’t mean that that magically now means that. You out of all people, who likes to rail against people using wrong definitions, should realise this.
The CS definition has never directly implied that downloading must also store the received data.
There’s no evidence afaik for extensive Russian meddling in the Dutch elections. Our electoral system makes it difficult for foreign meddling to have any extensive impact. The far-right hasn’t really grown much here, it consolidated into a single party. They’re also not explicitly pro-Russia either.
They’re stuck in a coalition government with three other parties and really haven’t made much of an impact at all.