Mine (really cheap G05) has it on the power button, much better than the back where it used to be on older models. Motorola have been innovative with the UX. It lights up when I pick it up, shake twice to toggle flashlight (extremely useful when looking for dog poop) and so on. Only brand I've considered for about a decade.
We don't NEED it, just like we don't need to use IP. But the standards are just easy to use. Feel free to develop your own L2 protocol. I remember using SLIP to make a point to point over FM radio, and there was no addressing used, just IP.
Calling it "eSIM" is BS marketing. Every time I've used them it's been painful. I don't know the details but it absolutely is not "SIM technology". "eSIM" is something completely different.
A regular SIM: you just pop a SIM card into your phone and it just God damn works.
But eSIMs? I've used eSIMs from five carriers in three different countries and every time there is some issue:
* "Oh you need our god awful app to install an eSIM" (of course I couldn't easily download it because Google play geo hides apps).
* "If your phone is stolen overseas you can simply use this QR barcode again to register an eSIM to a new phone" (I couldn't).
* "Works with all phones". (It didn't because phone manufacturers have to bake Telco specific data into your phones firmware. Not supported? You're shit out of luck).
I could go on..
The fact that there are now privacy and security issues is not surprisingly at all. This isn't teetching issues. The drafters of the eSIM standard should be publicly flogged.
It's an emulated sim card, it really does emulate that weird little Java processor and everything. It's totally "SIM technology" in that sense, even if it's not conventient because of the restrictions of the emulation device.
Well, a regular SIM mostly just works, except for when it doesn't.
I haven't had any APN issues with regular SIMs in a while actually, but it used to be a common problem that would only sometimes auto-configure correctly. I've definitely had to google carrier APN settings and fiddle with them for a while to get text, MMS, and internet access working properly.
I also recently had an issue where I moved my US MVNO provider SIM to a new phone and it mostly worked, except for RCS. When I called them, they claimed my phone model wasn't compatible with their network, despite me already using it on their network for months. Apparently in their opinion SIMs should never actually be moved to a different phone. They offered to sell me a new phone, but I switched to a new carrier instead.
I've also had APN issues with physical SIMs, they are definitely not perfect. But I have never had an unusable "bricked" physical SIM. My eSIMs gripes are from being unable to use the eSIM at all. It's essentially a brick at that point.
RCS is a whole another kettle of fish indeed and the fact it only works with Play Integrity being on Device/Strong and the bootloader being locked is absolutely asinine to me.
Well I can say that the update is not going 100% smoothly. I have a pending KEK update in Fedora but it's a test key (bug filed but no progress as of yet).
Because Plugshare is closed source, locked down and a bizarre cesspool of uncurated garbage with zealously curated but misleading or straight up wrong information.
For example, in Australia, the largest supercharger networks are Tesla and Evie. For reasons I won't even pretend to understand, Plugshare refuses to allow either name in their labels, so if a town has both, they're called "Town (1)" and "Town (2)" at random. Not only does this make searching a pain, but people just select whichever pin happens to be on top and then submit their charging reports for the wrong charger. Gar! Typical example:
Weird, this problem doesn't exist in Europe. I found Plugshare to be more reliable and informative than ABRP, especially in the areas where charger stations aren't that common.
Being truly open is a huge plus for OCM. Checking a few locations in both I found that PlugShare had locations properly listed as under maintenance while OCM listed them as open, so at least near me the Plugshare data seems more accurate.
I also really appreciate the images and comments people have posted in Plugshare to help find out of the way stations or stations that might not be reliable. If OSM took off it would get there, but none of the stations I checked had any comments or images.
I'm not a big fan of the OCM station formatting. There's a bunch of useless information above the fold and a bunch of useful information below the fold.
OCM doesn't appear to have any pricing information while PlugShare at least tells me if the station has a charge and if the parking itself has a charge.
I hope that open services like this can get station data from more direct sources for more accurate information, but the data isn't quite there yet for me to want to use it when I'm actively looking for a station.
This was my immediate question. Looking at this data in my city it reports a bunch of chargers that are either 100% gone or have been broken for a year. PlugShare reports those all correctly. I'd have a pretty bad time trying to charge around here (metro population of 2.5 million) if I relied on this dataset.
In London (UK), OCM seems to have more chargers and more accurate data than PlugShare. Zap Map is probably the best option though, but even them are missing some slow chargers.
The limitation is both ISS scheduling (it's very busy now and has been for a while) and number of available docking ports.
It's part of why the next crew dragon mission is being delayed, it needs to use the docking port currently occupied by Starliner (and Starliner can't leave until Boeing updates and uploads software for full autonomous operations).
The federal lower chamber (House of Representatives) uses optional preferential voting for candidates in a federal electorate.
I'm not sure if NZ is a fair comparison as it uses MMP, which is deliberately designed to favour multiple parties forming coalitions, not independents.
and scroll down to "local bodies" | Australia for a partial list.
The take home poin is that straight up simple Ranked Vote has an issue but is still (IMHO) better than FPTP and there are many ways to take the (minor) curse off of Ranked Vote to make it "better" (far less likely to hit a weird box corner that'll cause arguments | riots | civil war).
I mean, seriously, it's about electing|hiring people to work for the public, in the worst case we should at least just reset and restart, it's not life or death, it's just hiring a few managers that can be fired at any time or charged and imprisoned if they graft or steal.
i co-founded the center for election science. this is superficially reasonable, but IRV could paradoxically make things worse by squandering election reform resources (namely, money) on a suboptimal and overly complex fix, at the cost of progress on approval voting, score voting, etc. then, if IRV gets repealed often due to its complexity, we end up worse off. alaska is plausibly going to repeal IRV this november.
> if IRV gets repealed often due to its complexity,
Politicians of all stripes have introduced a mix of voting systems here, but remains it is predominantly IRV. When it is changed from IRV complexity is never the reason. It would be surprising if it was, because it isn't that complex and besides complexity doesn't worry the computer systems doing the counting.
The reason is always political: the mob in power chooses the system that benefits them. Invariably when they tinker with the voting system one side is fragmented (eg, there are two conservative parties) and one is not. IRV favours the fragmented one. So if that is the situation and the non-fragmented one is in power, then water down IRV in favour of FPP. If the fragmented one is in power the reverse happens.
The argument proffered in favour of returning to FFP is always "simplicity". It is a lie. They are never doing it to make things simple. They are doing it to keep themselves in office. If you give them the power to change the voting system at the stroke of a pen, they will do it regardless of whether it's IRV, Ranked voting or any other system.
Personally, I'd rank the voting systems from worst to best as FPP, just about anything other the FPP (the difference in outcomes is marginal), and MMP is best of all. The difference between the first two is a bit academic when you allow gerrymandering and don't have compulsory voting like the US. When you can change the rules on who is allowed to vote and where, it's so much easier to do that than change the voting system. MMP makes the system much harder to manipulate like that, and it is harder to undo because usually requires a constitutional change to set up.
I personally really dislike the screen ones. They're slower, less reliable and the location is unnatural.