Antlion itself an official wireless modmic, but it’s a staggering 150 bucks, was cheaper a could years ago… On the upside, it’s pretty much a lifetime purchase and really good quality. But it’s definitely overpriced.

If your budget is lower, you can look at lavalier mics or wire mics. Those are the kind that TV/ video guys usually wear. Lavaliers are simply tacked to the top of your shirt, while the wire mics are super thin wires that you wear under your actual headset. Both are light, have good audio quality and nur importantly are available at much wider and fairer price ranges, as they are less of a nice. Lav mics can be as cheap as ten bucks.

I have invested lots of effort and research and sadly money over the years into this specific question. And nowadays my recommendation would be: keep it simple.

That means: get a headset that is well reviewed and uses a wireless connection. Do not use Bluetooth. Bluetooth has good quality now, but no matter what perfect settings you use, you will have a noticeable delay, which is especially noticable during hectic gaming voice comms. Some headsets with a dedicated wireless receiver ( usually a small USB dongle) offer BT as an extra option, which can be great if you want to use it for listening to music or doing occasional calls while moving outside while linked to your phone.

Second tip: don’t get a combined all-in-one gaming headset. They can be good, but are always overpriced für what they offer. Marketing ftw. Instead get a good headset and get a simple separate mic. Modmic or any derivative works.

Overall, you’ll get tremendously better quality for significantly less price. The sheer amount of options for good “generic” headphones is immense. Added bonus: because the two are separate, you can swap one out when it breaks. Especially the addon microphones have a tendency to last decades, unlike the headsets themselves, which suffer more immediate wear and tear.

Which is fine

Kind of a bad example, because mankind very clearly stems from ‘humankind’. And people are lazy and prefer using short words. The unfairness is rather that women got stuck with the words requiring more characters. But that is a phenomenon of the English language and not present in others.

However, in most languages the words for man/male are closer to human(kind) than female/woman, which very clearly shows the historic patriarchal influence, coming back around to your point after all.

Interesting, will have to read up on how that works in Brazil. We also have a separate tax id here ( which is also used for pension and social security ), but that one is even more secure/private than the passport ID. We only provide that to our chosen medical insurance provider ( bc they need to register it with the ministry of finance ) as well as employers ( because 50% of the insurance has to be paid by employers).

It’s explicitly not allowed and intended for generic identification purposes, because it makes it too accessible for identity theft and associated scams.

Where do you live that providing your government id to a business is standard? In Germany, the only one outside of a judge to be allowed to request that is law enforcement ( even then only with proper cause ). Of course, some businesses are legally required to request and process your ID number ( e.g. when booking international flights, medical insurance companies etc), but these are under tight federal control and supervision to ensure data safety.

Age verification sometimes is a thing for purchasing 18+ things ( media or drugs like alcohol & smokes), but even then businesses will only ever perform a visual check of the date of birth on your ID. Technically they can never demand to hold your ID, not even for a short time just to better read the date. You only have to show them your ID. And actually recording and/or storing any of that information would be insanely illegal.

Germany / Europe might have its issues, but we at least try and take our freedom and data privacy serious. I would never dream of handing my ID to a generic business like a club for anything more than the age check.

Isn’t it weird that EU, famous for being so fragmented that they can’t decide on common interior or foreign policy, all while being ridiculed for their large and inefficient bureaucracy, still is the sole entity that manages to stand up to mega corporations?

And those are sometimes fights that have zero benefit to a different wealthy elite, but actually protect citizen liberties.

I shudder to think how the world would look like if EU had not established and enforced the GDPR as well as it does. Consumer protection is probably one of the only fields where the EU had a global positive impact.

Yes. User Agent is a http header that is part of every request you send to a server. As such, it is 100% client side and it can be whatever you want, it’s just a text string. For layman users, I’d recommend using an addon for it, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/

Of course, you can also change the user agent string in the browser config manually. The official Mozilla support page describes the process in detail: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-reset-default-user-agent-firefox

We factually know that China is committing (at least cultural) genocide, possibly more such as forced sterilizations and relocations against Uighurs in Xinjiang, and we still deal and trade with them. Not only some big evil corporations, many individuals knowingly buy Chinese products all this. Because they are cheaper. Money talks now, money talked back then. Yes, everybody is to blame for their part in not speaking and acting against injustices of the world, but there are different levels of “helping” someone commit evil.

Back in the 30s and for decades after, many in the US could not share the same bathroom or attend schools/education based on the color of their skin, and many in the general populace were fine with it.

Pretty much. RCS just defines the protocol. That is basically how messages are formatted, how recipients and senders are labeled, how timestamps are formatted, how messages are compressed, transferred and possibly stored and resent in case of inability to deliver (e.g. recipients phone is off) and a lot more technical stuff.

To use this, you need a network of servers that can actually receive messages from phones/ cell network, then possibly transfer them to a server/ cell tower near the recipient(s) to have it broadcast there, making sure only the intended recipient can decrypt it, and possibly storing it for an unknown duration and a number of attempts to deliver it if the recipient is unreachable. And possibly sending a receipt or failure-to-deliver message back to the sender as well. And all of this has to work reliably 24/7, because people will not accept downtimes.

And then you also need client software on the phones to send/receive messages using the RCS protocol as well, hopefully handling true e2e encryption as well.

It’s a lot of hardware and software engineering to actuallyimplement such a seemingly fundamental standard.

“Help” is a inflammatory hyperbole. IBM had good financial relations with Nazi Germany, and its tech was heavily used in many bureaucratic endeavors, just like in many other nations. This included holding a census, organizing many of the fairly recently federalized infrastructure systems such as railway, telephones, etc. Remember, Germany was only merged a couple decades before from a mix of dozens of highly individual states with history going back almost a thousand years. So it was a lot of work to do in short time, and Germany was never before and never since(!) as centralized as it was under Nazi rule.

As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that IBM as a company was even aware of, much less actively and intentionally “helped” the Holocaust. With that logic, everyone that did any business with Germany in the 1930s “helped the Holocaust”. I think a more nuanced view is beneficial for all. Don’t dilute the blame from those that truly deserve it.

RCS is an open standard that states to be formalized over ten years ago, and was planned to replace SMS. However, SMS is a service offered by the cell network providers, so these were addressed to get together and implement it in all networks, so everyone can reliably use it, just like SMS works everywhere. it’s not a feature of phone or OS manufacturers. They simply use the SMS protocol that is already available in the network implementation.

Sadly, the big network providers have failed to reach a consensus on if and when and how to implement RCS. Some say they simply had nothing to gain from it, and I believe they might be right. So they dragged their feet so long that Apple implemented iMessage to offer more features. Google held out longer waiting for the providers, but ultimately gave up as well and implemented their own messaging solution. And while the implementation is proprietary, it’s still based on the open RCS standard, unlike the fully closed iMessage protocol and implementation. This means that as long Apple supports the RCS standard, it matters little to the end user if they build their own proprietary implementation. Google and Apple will be able to talk to each other via RCS. So why is it still not great, even if everyone will be able to use RCS this way?

Well, look a bit further. Any non-Android and non-Apple phone will not be able to participate unless they submit to Google it Apple. No more indie phones with truly independent RCS. The services are also owned and controlled by Google and Apple, two companies that are notoriously resistant to regulations. Unlike cell network providers, which are under comparatively strict federal regulatory control, and even international treaties on minimal requirements for consumer protection. They are well supervised and have to adhere to high security and privacy standards. It’s definitely not perfect, but the current development is much worse. With RCS, it’s now two global supranational companies that will handle your private communications, and history has shown that they are much less worried about adhering to local national laws.

This. It’s Brezel, Brezn, Breze or Brezl. Never is there a t in there. Except in Swiss German, which hardly is German at all.

Compared to currently having to replace the entire phone when the battery dies?

Exactly right. I just meant that it definitely still will be uncomfortably warm when you get in at first, but overall hear will be lower. So definitely use it!

Preventing the interior from being hit by direct sunlight also has the huge advantage the once you let out the warm air, there are no superheated parts that continue to radiate heat for many more minutes, making the actual ride much more enjoyable as well.

It’s the same if it has this silvery surface which reflects radiation. Also don’t expect miracles. If you park in the sun, the air inside will still be super hot. The actual advantage is that your dash, steering wheel and seats won’t be lava when you get in the car.