Hi, not well educated on the details of VPNs and network security so this may be a basic question, but - VPNs are used regularly by corporates to enable secure intranet access to people offsite, etc - surely completely blocking VPNs or detecting and punishing VPN users is severely detrimental to business and not something countries would want to do carte blanche? How does this work?

It's possible that they're only blocking the VPNs hosted outside of the country (and thus bypassing censorship).

Of course, that would still impact international remote workers, but it's probably niche enough for the government to offload it as their problem.

Yep, same experience here. The name is a big problem.

There's a major difference of scale. No individual human artist can reliably learn to copy every other artists' styles, and then produce infinite works in those styles.

This particular misspelling happens often enough (on this forum) that I don't think it's unreasonable to think that some people are doing it intentionally as a form of trolling.

I work for a company whose primary product is an extension. From my experience it's quite random; sometimes an update will pass 'review' a few hours after submission (never a few minutes, but it's clearly not being reviewed in any depth) and other times it will be held up for a few days, a week, or up to 15 days recently. It seems to be a lottery, where your chances of a manual review are increased by requiring certain permissions and other factors the chrome gods decide are risky. In our case they have rejected updates several times for spurious reasons, like claiming we do not use the notifications permission although we asked for it - even though use of the `.notifications` method on the chrome javascript api was visible in our code.

I think GPs point stands - whether or not they actually review every update, they make the claim that extensions are reviewed, and they're reviewed often enough that they should be able to catch genuinely dangerous extensions.

Yes it is, and extensions for Brave are installed through the Chrome Web Store, as are extensions for other chromium based browsers like Edge. There's no escaping the manifest v3 event horizon for extension developers.

Australia tried something similar with a carbon tax a few years ago - not for fuel, but for carbon emissions generally. The policy was very well designed and ensured that lower income earners were compensated for any increase in costs to the extent that they had a net benefit, and in the short time it was operating, was successful at reducing emissions.

Unfortunately for us (and the world) this was too complicated for many Australians to understand and the political right exploited that to tell a scary story about a 'new tax', leading to their election and the removal of the scheme.

While economists (and rational thinkers) generally love carbon pricing schemes, they have been pretty unsuccessful politically because people are generally too stupid to understand them and cynical politicians in bed with the fossil fuel industry are happy to play to that.

Hi, I appreciated your article. Do you know when Agave was introduced to India? Perhaps a timeline may assist with determining the identity of the food, since Agaves are from central and South America and were presumably brought to India sometime in the past few hundred years. Is this a food item that has a long tradition?

Small note of feedback since I couldn't find a way to comment on the Atlas Obscura site. Species names are conventionally written with the specific epithet entirely in lower case, like 'Genus species'. In the article, you have frequently capitalised the specific epithet. This is a small issue but made the article quite hard to read for a details-focused botanist such as myself.

Came to say the same about naming. Just want to add that after the first full naming, they should be shortened as 'G. specie', and not 'Specie' like they do.

With those 2 simple rules you have your needs covered. Corner cases add complicatiins, but unless you are in the bussiness you shouldn't need it.

> They have a very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder: https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code

It looks like Theo is a US company, so perhaps "zip code" is more appropriate but those of us in the rest of the world are generally frustrated by websites which present a form field which could be called the generic 'postal code', meaningful to anyone in the world, labelled as 'zip code', something which is specific to the US.

Looking at the Theo website, it appears they use BigCommerce, which is an Australian ecommerce as a service site, which explains why they don't use 'zip code'. Although, your usability complaint about the behaviour of the field absolutely stacks up and suggests they might be using the wrong form widget there.

Many many sites have these "it's more easier and also convenient I swear" finder pages that refuse to just give you a map to click on. Wanna see if you can pick something up there next time you're in $city? Better google for a zip code in that city.

In this way there are a lot of web developers making money preventing businesses from acquiring all of the customers who might be interested in them.

ICEs might be incremental, but its a long enough increment that it is having severely detrimental effects on planetary and human health, so I'm not sure if it counts.

Cars, on the other hand, are not incremental - they have locked us into an urban design pattern that will remain problematic no matter what the form of energy generation that drives them is.