That’s the garden variety censorship though, right? Your government deciding no one should be allowed access, not just restricting access behind mandatory state sanctioned identity theft like some of the more “Enlightened” countries have.
I think the normies just find the niche hard to appreciate. People don’t think about things like ownership and DRM until they are forced to.
Luckily GOG isn’t affected at this stage.
Yep I can see them in search but I’m an Australian with no credit card, that’s all I can see.
I always thought the decision was made a lot earlier than that. Wasn’t it largely due to Westinghouse that America settled on 60hz 110v? Where AEG pushed 50hz 220v in Europe? That was late 1800s early 1900s from memory. World war 2 may have resulted in some rebuilding but they rebuilt along lines that were already established, the bump up to 230-240v with time and gained efficiencies is mirrored in the US with the move towards 120v at least that’s what I recall, but I must admit that outside of some Technology Connections videos I haven’t delved too deeply in recent years (and yes I know Alec would say the US technically already sends 240v but that’s not what your general appliances are rated to).
Takes a couple of litres of water before we get hot water. I have filled the kettle twice before the water was too hot to hold my hand under before. That’s roughly 3.5 litres of water just to get to the hot stuff. Luckily boiling water was a key consideration in our voltage level (actually that’s something I made up on the spot 😜) but more power equals good so… Its weird that this is a field that the US apparently just decided to let a large portion of the world be more “powerful” almost expect that if there were parts of the world settling on 240v the US would arbitarily decide they needed 500v.
Different country and all, but both are 240v in my neck of the woods, and since I live on tank water with mains water supply as a back up. Coupled with what I believe may be the most circuitous route from hot water cylinder to kitchen tap on earth (3 meters point to point yet seeming out to the local post office and back based on how long it takes to get hot water out of the tap) we use the Dishwasher to heat our water.
Which is all a very verbose way of saying “It depends on your circumstance…”
It all used to be very easy in Australia, you bought the phone at a supermarket and gave bogus info when registering the SIM. Then the “War on Terror™” began and the government started taking things a bit more seriously started mandating the paper registration forms needed to be completed or the retailers could get in trouble. But your average supermarket worker wasn’t going to take the time to do that and it was way too widespread for the government to actually crack down on it.
Took a few years but the Telcos started actually paying attention to the fact that the majority of prepaid phones weren’t getting completed paperwork at point of sale so they just moved to make all sim card activations require online or over the phone ID checks.
Every bit of training I ever did made it clear it was all about catching terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles, which of course means “We want all that juicy data without citizens asking any annoying questions.”
It is a really good filter for me, any company that wants to harvest the bogus information I will use to access them had better do a good job of convincing me it’s worth the effort.
I have a similar take on online stores wanting me to create a login to get a shipping cost, unless they are offering a truly unique item, or outrageously good price I just don’t buy anything from them.
If we all had a similar standards these bits of UX fuckery would disappear over time, unfortunately most people don’t even think about it.
Yeah, maybe. Different pathways to the same end I guess still gets you to the same end… In Germany.