Sure, we dress it up with pretty graphs and we all stand around in serious suits pretending we know what the hell we're talking about, but any economist will tell you it's all about perception and mood.
All of these revelations won't change a damn thing. We'll still pay glorified tarot-card readers millions of dollars to manage portfilios, that reality distortion field around Wall Street will continue to be maintained by Greed N. Corruption, and all the computing power in the world won't be able to predict or avoid the next collapse.
Find something that actually devalues "complex stock mechanics", preventing it from shitting out billion-dollar valuations. Then we'll be making progress.
People are cheap. They will happily trade their digital soul for a "free" price tag, and don't give a shit about privacy anymore when it comes to corporations asking for data because they trust them. Clearly the masses value ignorance. Must be blissful.
It seems to me that it's almost never a good idea to start from "people are trading X for Y, that seems grossly out of whack to me" and immediately conclude "therefore they are ignorant of X or Y". Maybe they are ignorant, maybe they have other reasons, maybe their value system and your value system don't align (it happens!). But at the very minimum we would need to actually ask the people making the decision in order to have any hope of answering the question accurately.
OK, let's ask the people.
I challenge you to walk up to any stranger on the street and ask to see their internet history. Offer them $20 for it. I'm willing to bet 99% of people won't share it, and would likely be offended, and yet 99% of them will happily give that information away in exchange for a free download of [social media viral app].
A person holding your internet history might abuse it. A corporation will sell your digital soul to every bidder every time, and yet the masses hand it out like candy.
If an app had a price tag of $10 but promised to not share your personal information, the masses would incessantly bitch about the cost. For something they wouldn't even sell to another person, they sure as hell don't put much value on it when a corporation comes around offering "free" services.
They're also paying for the untold amount of terabytes of bloated app updates passing through their CDN. They have a pretty good per-month incentive to slim it down.
Personal data has real value, but without a physical form, the general public do not grasp a full sense of it's worth.
I don't have to print out a hardcopy of someones Internet history in order to elicit a reaction. It can exist in 1s and 0s on their computer, and they will get equally offended when I ask to see it. Other concepts like love, friendship, dedication, and honesty don't hold a physical form, and yet they are valued by many.
Sadly, the answer here is much simpler than you think. People are cheap. They will happily trade their digital soul for a "free" price tag, and don't give a shit about privacy anymore when it comes to corporations asking for data because they trust them. Clearly the masses value ignorance. Must be blissful.
It is silly to label them a monopoly when they aren't even the market leader.
FFS, first or second place hardly matters when there are only two fucking players left. This isn't about "leaders". This is about destroying the market altogether. You can't point at the other monopoly to dismiss or justify the existence of the arrogant and soul-crushing behavior of market domination. It's become a pathetic joke to even have anti-monopoly laws on the books anymore. At this rate, the world will be reduced to a dozen mega-corps within the next decade or two, with Amazon being the "Everything Everything" proxy. The middle class will dissolve away just as the concept of competition will. In the end, there will only be the 0.0001%, and the rest of the enslaved planet.
There are many dangerous addictions, but Greed is the one that will ultimately lead to our demise.
Justifiable in this context doesn't speak to the morality of the ambition, only that the ambition is believable. It may be a bad idea, but Amazon can justifiably be claimed to be trying to do it.
I think I'm rather justified in saying that corporate training related to morals and ethics shouldn't be mandated anymore when it clearly has fuck-all to do with business anymore.
A distributed risk essentially dissolves into the background noise that is the risk of being a human on this planet.
No. Not even close. It CAN mean that, but rarely if ever does.
Especially in this case, and especially with solar, you are concentrating risk at: 1: Rare earth element mines - both with working conditions ( hint in many, many countries they are horrible death traps ) as well as broader environmental issues with tailing spoils and acid mine drainage contaminating the environment a la Gold King mine in Silverton CO. 2: toxic waste production and disposal from manufacturing - If you think the waste is being disposed of properly by the companies trying to produce panels at bottom dollar prices you really should check into a mental health facility... because that is insane.
A heavy equipment operator stands a far greater chance being killed in their personal vehicle driving to a "dangerous" work environment, and sadly suicide is what often kills humans in high places, not accidents.
Sources? What heavy equipment are we talking about? Bulldozers that stay on the ground in low risk areas or equipment in high risk areas like heights / depths.
Also I would LOVE to see the source of suicide VS. accident ratios in work places that include heights. I.E. Not random jumpers that had jobs that were not on bridges / buildings.
Also, ignoring saftey regulations and equipment while extremely stupid can't be counted as suicide.
All workplace related deaths in the US number around 5,000 per year, out of which heavy equipment fatalities number in the hundreds, which also includes the stupid ignorant ones ignoring safety regulations. That's a far cry from the 40,000+ deaths per year from personal transportation that we tend to use multiple times every day. Yes, the risks of being killed driving a car are considerably higher regardless of what job we do.
Like personal transportation, suicide is a leading cause of death, also accounting for 40,000+ deaths per year. Statistics don't break down suicide by bridge, but it's likely that the "other" category that accounts for 7 - 10% of suicide deaths would include those using high places to end their lives.
Amazon isn't in the retail business. Amazon isn't in the cloud computing business. Amazon isn't in the logistics business. Amazon is in the business business. It is no longer The Everything Store; it is now the Everything Everything. It wants to be the platform around which all of the world's businesses depend.
This is about as ambitious a mission as a company has ever launched, in my opinion -- and Amazon may be the first company with a justifiable claim to such ambition.
Uh, a justifiable claim? Yeah right. There is no justification to annihilate the concept of competition by becoming the global proxy for "Everything". There isn't a justifiable need for it either.
First rule of logistics; Don't become dependent on a single source provider.
Tends to get reduced to bullshit semantics outside of bandwidth concerns. At the end of the day, even "optimized" updates are feeding bloated appware that's consuming precious device storage.
And I find Apples give-a-shit level quite low when they are in the highly profitable business of selling soldered-memory upgrades for app-enabled hardware. Hell, their default bloatware says volumes about that. Garageband and iMovie apps consume over 2GB? Fucking seriously...
A nuclear meltdown is caused by one thing, and an entire growing industry of power alternatives exist that fully mitigate the risk of a meltdown by essentially removing the risk altogether. Let's not try and compare these two risks as equal; they are clearly not.
While it's true wind and solar don't have meltdown risks like nuclear plants, they are not risk-free. It's just the risks are more distributed. Solar requires rare earth mining which involves lots of heavy equipment and dangerous work environments. Wind turbine construction has killed workers from falls and other actions associated with working in and around heavy machinery. I think that's more in line with the risks the OP was referring to.
A distributed risk essentially dissolves into the background noise that is the risk of being a human on this planet.
A heavy equipment operator stands a far greater chance being killed in their personal vehicle driving to a "dangerous" work environment, and sadly suicide is what often kills humans in high places, not accidents.
Can I sit for the MCSE exam with a high-school diploma?
Does Oracle require a Bachelors degree to become a DBA?
We need to drop this bullshit argument within the IT sector. 98% of the time, you're paying for the specialized skills.A perfect example of this is the utter lack of a degree requirement when hiring a technical consultant or contractor. Not everyone in IT is going to become a CxO, and most don't want to. Obtaining and keeping specialized skills honed is far more valuable for organizations needing it.
People worry about being hit by drunk drivers, not so much their own mistakes....
And this mentality is exactly why I fear being killed by a distracted driver far more than any drunk driver. Every idiot behind the wheel holds a capability to become distracted, and a lot of them abuse it, particularly the younger generation of drivers who are addicted to social media.
Terrorists and meltdowns are risks we can't easily manage or mitigate, they just exist.
Terrorism is caused by many things, and can be defined many ways. A nuclear meltdown is caused by one thing, and an entire growing industry of power alternatives exist that fully mitigate the risk of a meltdown by essentially removing the risk altogether. Let's not try and compare these two risks as equal; they are clearly not.
You can opt out. Put aside the credit cards and toss the various rebate cards. Shop with cash only.
Perhaps inconvenient in the beginning; but if many go this road, there will be a market for a credit card company that doesn't sell any info about customers. Starting such a company is also an option - some people would happily leave visa etc. for a credit card with an anonymity contract.
If "many" go this road?? Only 5% of the consumer market even gives a shit enough about privacy anymore to even want an anonymity clause. THAT is the problem. 95% of consumers will happily trade their digital soul in exchange for no fees, 5% off every purchase, and a free donut in their birthday.
Also remember how many services are "free" today. Digital souls are highly profitable, and often subsidize the costs of running a business. Would you be willing to pay a $200 annual fee in exchange for anonymity? 95% of consumers sure as hell wouldn't. They get pissed if you have the unmitigated gall to charge $2 for a fucking cell phone app.
You can tell this guy is an uniformed dufus when you read this:
"The end of the DSLR for most people has already arrived"
No camera phone will ever replace DSLR's for professional photographers. Most people had "toy" DSLR's. Actually what most people had were "point and shoot" cameras.
And most people who used to use a DSLR as a "point and shoot" camera in the past replaced that with a smartphone, making the point in TFS rather valid.
To further validate the point being made, most people don't give a shit enough about picture quality to learn how to use a DSLR properly, or spend the money on specialized hardware when a rather costly smartphone is now considered "good enough". Professionals will always use the proper tool regardless. They would not be considered professionals otherwise.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but unless a multi-billion dollar global megacorp like Samsung is legally beholden to Google's Android OS, the one to blame here is Samsung.
Don't like being held back? Then develop your own damn mobile OS and innovate. Your competition sure as hell did.
what's the point, really? The only victims here are people who aren't responsible for this. They're left without internet for days until this is fixed.
Yes, we know shit is insecure, but take it on the people responsible for this, not on the users. They will still be billed. And no one will be fired for the mistake.
The entire point of targeting insecure hardware is to get the attention of those who created that clusterfuck in order for them to fix it.
Yes, that sometimes means innocent victims get caught in the crossfire. That bullshit will continue until vendors pull their head out of their ass and learn to prioritize security over profits. And speaking of profits and impact, if I were the customer, I certainly would not be paying for service during an outage. I'd be demanding a refund and consider leaving for another provider.
Man this crew is setting some records! I wonder how many more they'll set before the summers out. All this entertainment and still haven't passed anything of mention.
Well, Trump did champion the concept of Drain the Swamp a time or two.
Perhaps he overlooked the fact the swamp was on his own property...
Basically IPV6 and end to end encryption. Sorry ISPs you do not get a say anymore.
Needs more than just that.
A new internet needs to be decentralized and anonymous to the point that nobody except participants can tell who had a conversation with whom. If the government decides A is bad and they know you talked to A or did a DNS lookup for A's website, then it doesn't matter if the channel was encrypted - they can beat whatever info they want out of you.
Ever consider the fact that if the government determines they absolutely cannot figure out who or what you talked to, their only option left is to beat whatever info they want out of you? You act like encryption somehow thwarts a crowbar. It doesn't.
At the same time, a new internet needs to be able to absolutely prove (if and only if you want) that you are you and whoever you are talking to is who they say they are.
Maybe there are protocols out there right now that can do these things without too much hassle?
Oh you mean like PGP/GPG, or any of the other signature-enabled encryption solutions that have cropped up in the last 20+ years? The masses could have taken the time and effort to figure out how to communicate securely and validate exactly who they're communicating with. They chose to become a better idiot instead, showcased by the many insecure computer interfaces that can be operated by a 3-year old.
the safe's design allows for a margin of error to compensate for humans getting their combination slightly wrong
Seriously? The safe is designed to say "Wrong number, but meh, close enough."
Yes, seriously. I've opened Sentry safes before and knew I had screwed up the combination, only to find the safe opening because I was apparently close enough.
Sadly, the safe manufacturer had to design this close-enough feature into their product because humans who want to own cheap safes can't manage to turn a dial accurately. Probably also the same reason we've gone from dials to keypads and fingerprint sensors (which will be cracked next month by a monkey armed with a pack of gummy bears)
Congested roadways and pollution wasn't invented in California. And they sure as hell don't hold a patent on it, preventing the rest of of the world from abusing it.
You have badly congested roadways because you have bad policies.
If this is merely a policy problem, then that "policy" has been adopted by damn near every other heavily populated country in the world.
Volume is a critical value, as any engineer can attest.
You can use pretty much every component in a stolen iPhone except for the logic board and touchID sensor (which is paired with the logic board).
So stolen phones are still valuable because you can sell the parts...
People know how to strip phones for resale about as much as they know how to strip cars for resale. There's still a very small risk that you'll be targeted by someone who holds these skills. If this could be done by anyone, we probably would have not seen a reduction in phone thefts based on software-based protections.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, we dress it up with pretty graphs and we all stand around in serious suits pretending we know what the hell we're talking about, but any economist will tell you it's all about perception and mood.
All of these revelations won't change a damn thing. We'll still pay glorified tarot-card readers millions of dollars to manage portfilios, that reality distortion field around Wall Street will continue to be maintained by Greed N. Corruption, and all the computing power in the world won't be able to predict or avoid the next collapse.
Find something that actually devalues "complex stock mechanics", preventing it from shitting out billion-dollar valuations. Then we'll be making progress.
People are cheap. They will happily trade their digital soul for a "free" price tag, and don't give a shit about privacy anymore when it comes to corporations asking for data because they trust them. Clearly the masses value ignorance. Must be blissful.
It seems to me that it's almost never a good idea to start from "people are trading X for Y, that seems grossly out of whack to me" and immediately conclude "therefore they are ignorant of X or Y". Maybe they are ignorant, maybe they have other reasons, maybe their value system and your value system don't align (it happens!). But at the very minimum we would need to actually ask the people making the decision in order to have any hope of answering the question accurately.
OK, let's ask the people.
I challenge you to walk up to any stranger on the street and ask to see their internet history. Offer them $20 for it. I'm willing to bet 99% of people won't share it, and would likely be offended, and yet 99% of them will happily give that information away in exchange for a free download of [social media viral app].
A person holding your internet history might abuse it. A corporation will sell your digital soul to every bidder every time, and yet the masses hand it out like candy.
If an app had a price tag of $10 but promised to not share your personal information, the masses would incessantly bitch about the cost. For something they wouldn't even sell to another person, they sure as hell don't put much value on it when a corporation comes around offering "free" services.
They're also paying for the untold amount of terabytes of bloated app updates passing through their CDN. They have a pretty good per-month incentive to slim it down.
Chumps pay by the drink. Kings pay fixed cost.
In the grand scheme of things, Apple is no chump.
Personal data has real value, but without a physical form, the general public do not grasp a full sense of it's worth.
I don't have to print out a hardcopy of someones Internet history in order to elicit a reaction. It can exist in 1s and 0s on their computer, and they will get equally offended when I ask to see it. Other concepts like love, friendship, dedication, and honesty don't hold a physical form, and yet they are valued by many.
Sadly, the answer here is much simpler than you think. People are cheap. They will happily trade their digital soul for a "free" price tag, and don't give a shit about privacy anymore when it comes to corporations asking for data because they trust them. Clearly the masses value ignorance. Must be blissful.
becoming the global proxy for "Everything".
Do you realize that Amazon is the world's second biggest e-commerce company?
It is silly to label them a monopoly when they aren't even the market leader.
FFS, first or second place hardly matters when there are only two fucking players left. This isn't about "leaders". This is about destroying the market altogether. You can't point at the other monopoly to dismiss or justify the existence of the arrogant and soul-crushing behavior of market domination. It's become a pathetic joke to even have anti-monopoly laws on the books anymore. At this rate, the world will be reduced to a dozen mega-corps within the next decade or two, with Amazon being the "Everything Everything" proxy. The middle class will dissolve away just as the concept of competition will. In the end, there will only be the 0.0001%, and the rest of the enslaved planet.
There are many dangerous addictions, but Greed is the one that will ultimately lead to our demise.
Justifiable in this context doesn't speak to the morality of the ambition, only that the ambition is believable. It may be a bad idea, but Amazon can justifiably be claimed to be trying to do it.
I think I'm rather justified in saying that corporate training related to morals and ethics shouldn't be mandated anymore when it clearly has fuck-all to do with business anymore.
A distributed risk essentially dissolves into the background noise that is the risk of being a human on this planet.
No. Not even close. It CAN mean that, but rarely if ever does. Especially in this case, and especially with solar, you are concentrating risk at: 1: Rare earth element mines - both with working conditions ( hint in many, many countries they are horrible death traps ) as well as broader environmental issues with tailing spoils and acid mine drainage contaminating the environment a la Gold King mine in Silverton CO. 2: toxic waste production and disposal from manufacturing - If you think the waste is being disposed of properly by the companies trying to produce panels at bottom dollar prices you really should check into a mental health facility... because that is insane.
A heavy equipment operator stands a far greater chance being killed in their personal vehicle driving to a "dangerous" work environment, and sadly suicide is what often kills humans in high places, not accidents.
Sources? What heavy equipment are we talking about? Bulldozers that stay on the ground in low risk areas or equipment in high risk areas like heights / depths.
Also I would LOVE to see the source of suicide VS. accident ratios in work places that include heights. I.E. Not random jumpers that had jobs that were not on bridges / buildings. Also, ignoring saftey regulations and equipment while extremely stupid can't be counted as suicide.
All workplace related deaths in the US number around 5,000 per year, out of which heavy equipment fatalities number in the hundreds, which also includes the stupid ignorant ones ignoring safety regulations. That's a far cry from the 40,000+ deaths per year from personal transportation that we tend to use multiple times every day. Yes, the risks of being killed driving a car are considerably higher regardless of what job we do.
Like personal transportation, suicide is a leading cause of death, also accounting for 40,000+ deaths per year. Statistics don't break down suicide by bridge, but it's likely that the "other" category that accounts for 7 - 10% of suicide deaths would include those using high places to end their lives.
Amazon isn't in the retail business. Amazon isn't in the cloud computing business. Amazon isn't in the logistics business. Amazon is in the business business. It is no longer The Everything Store; it is now the Everything Everything. It wants to be the platform around which all of the world's businesses depend.
This is about as ambitious a mission as a company has ever launched, in my opinion -- and Amazon may be the first company with a justifiable claim to such ambition.
Uh, a justifiable claim? Yeah right. There is no justification to annihilate the concept of competition by becoming the global proxy for "Everything". There isn't a justifiable need for it either.
First rule of logistics; Don't become dependent on a single source provider.
Antennas are cool and all, but did the headline have to be sarcastic and condescending to millennials?
When the level of ignorance exceeds a certain threshold, the end result is often sarcasm.
That concept is way older than antennas or Millennials.
You might be shocked about someone discovering OTA programming in the year 2017.
I'm more shocked over the fact that he didn't know about a free product, which is a clear violation of the Millennial Manifesto.
"App Update Size is not the same as App Size"
Tends to get reduced to bullshit semantics outside of bandwidth concerns. At the end of the day, even "optimized" updates are feeding bloated appware that's consuming precious device storage.
And I find Apples give-a-shit level quite low when they are in the highly profitable business of selling soldered-memory upgrades for app-enabled hardware. Hell, their default bloatware says volumes about that. Garageband and iMovie apps consume over 2GB? Fucking seriously...
Storage utilization is the user's problem, not the software engineer's.
The CEO from Bloatware, Inc. just called.
He wants you to stop infringing on his legally protected slogan.
A nuclear meltdown is caused by one thing, and an entire growing industry of power alternatives exist that fully mitigate the risk of a meltdown by essentially removing the risk altogether. Let's not try and compare these two risks as equal; they are clearly not.
While it's true wind and solar don't have meltdown risks like nuclear plants, they are not risk-free. It's just the risks are more distributed. Solar requires rare earth mining which involves lots of heavy equipment and dangerous work environments. Wind turbine construction has killed workers from falls and other actions associated with working in and around heavy machinery. I think that's more in line with the risks the OP was referring to.
A distributed risk essentially dissolves into the background noise that is the risk of being a human on this planet.
A heavy equipment operator stands a far greater chance being killed in their personal vehicle driving to a "dangerous" work environment, and sadly suicide is what often kills humans in high places, not accidents.
I'm certain that this won't be turned into yet another always listening device in the home, complete with the always watching bonus feature, right?
Sometimes I wonder if vendors make products just to test the ignorance level of the masses.
Then I remember that consumers don't care about privacy anymore, and somehow I feel better knowing it's willful ignorance.
Does a CCIE require a Masters degree?
Can I sit for the MCSE exam with a high-school diploma?
Does Oracle require a Bachelors degree to become a DBA?
We need to drop this bullshit argument within the IT sector. 98% of the time, you're paying for the specialized skills.A perfect example of this is the utter lack of a degree requirement when hiring a technical consultant or contractor. Not everyone in IT is going to become a CxO, and most don't want to. Obtaining and keeping specialized skills honed is far more valuable for organizations needing it.
People worry about being hit by drunk drivers, not so much their own mistakes....
And this mentality is exactly why I fear being killed by a distracted driver far more than any drunk driver. Every idiot behind the wheel holds a capability to become distracted, and a lot of them abuse it, particularly the younger generation of drivers who are addicted to social media.
Terrorists and meltdowns are risks we can't easily manage or mitigate, they just exist.
Terrorism is caused by many things, and can be defined many ways. A nuclear meltdown is caused by one thing, and an entire growing industry of power alternatives exist that fully mitigate the risk of a meltdown by essentially removing the risk altogether. Let's not try and compare these two risks as equal; they are clearly not.
You can opt out. Put aside the credit cards and toss the various rebate cards. Shop with cash only.
Perhaps inconvenient in the beginning; but if many go this road, there will be a market for a credit card company that doesn't sell any info about customers. Starting such a company is also an option - some people would happily leave visa etc. for a credit card with an anonymity contract.
If "many" go this road?? Only 5% of the consumer market even gives a shit enough about privacy anymore to even want an anonymity clause. THAT is the problem. 95% of consumers will happily trade their digital soul in exchange for no fees, 5% off every purchase, and a free donut in their birthday.
Also remember how many services are "free" today. Digital souls are highly profitable, and often subsidize the costs of running a business. Would you be willing to pay a $200 annual fee in exchange for anonymity? 95% of consumers sure as hell wouldn't. They get pissed if you have the unmitigated gall to charge $2 for a fucking cell phone app.
You can tell this guy is an uniformed dufus when you read this:
"The end of the DSLR for most people has already arrived"
No camera phone will ever replace DSLR's for professional photographers. Most people had "toy" DSLR's. Actually what most people had were "point and shoot" cameras.
And most people who used to use a DSLR as a "point and shoot" camera in the past replaced that with a smartphone, making the point in TFS rather valid.
To further validate the point being made, most people don't give a shit enough about picture quality to learn how to use a DSLR properly, or spend the money on specialized hardware when a rather costly smartphone is now considered "good enough". Professionals will always use the proper tool regardless. They would not be considered professionals otherwise.
"Here is the problem: It's Android."
Perhaps I'm wrong, but unless a multi-billion dollar global megacorp like Samsung is legally beholden to Google's Android OS, the one to blame here is Samsung.
Don't like being held back? Then develop your own damn mobile OS and innovate. Your competition sure as hell did.
what's the point, really? The only victims here are people who aren't responsible for this. They're left without internet for days until this is fixed. Yes, we know shit is insecure, but take it on the people responsible for this, not on the users. They will still be billed. And no one will be fired for the mistake.
The entire point of targeting insecure hardware is to get the attention of those who created that clusterfuck in order for them to fix it.
Yes, that sometimes means innocent victims get caught in the crossfire. That bullshit will continue until vendors pull their head out of their ass and learn to prioritize security over profits. And speaking of profits and impact, if I were the customer, I certainly would not be paying for service during an outage. I'd be demanding a refund and consider leaving for another provider.
Man this crew is setting some records! I wonder how many more they'll set before the summers out. All this entertainment and still haven't passed anything of mention.
Well, Trump did champion the concept of Drain the Swamp a time or two.
Perhaps he overlooked the fact the swamp was on his own property...
Basically IPV6 and end to end encryption. Sorry ISPs you do not get a say anymore.
Needs more than just that.
A new internet needs to be decentralized and anonymous to the point that nobody except participants can tell who had a conversation with whom. If the government decides A is bad and they know you talked to A or did a DNS lookup for A's website, then it doesn't matter if the channel was encrypted - they can beat whatever info they want out of you.
Ever consider the fact that if the government determines they absolutely cannot figure out who or what you talked to, their only option left is to beat whatever info they want out of you? You act like encryption somehow thwarts a crowbar. It doesn't.
At the same time, a new internet needs to be able to absolutely prove (if and only if you want) that you are you and whoever you are talking to is who they say they are.
Maybe there are protocols out there right now that can do these things without too much hassle?
Oh you mean like PGP/GPG, or any of the other signature-enabled encryption solutions that have cropped up in the last 20+ years? The masses could have taken the time and effort to figure out how to communicate securely and validate exactly who they're communicating with. They chose to become a better idiot instead, showcased by the many insecure computer interfaces that can be operated by a 3-year old.
the safe's design allows for a margin of error to compensate for humans getting their combination slightly wrong
Seriously? The safe is designed to say "Wrong number, but meh, close enough."
Yes, seriously. I've opened Sentry safes before and knew I had screwed up the combination, only to find the safe opening because I was apparently close enough.
Sadly, the safe manufacturer had to design this close-enough feature into their product because humans who want to own cheap safes can't manage to turn a dial accurately. Probably also the same reason we've gone from dials to keypads and fingerprint sensors (which will be cracked next month by a monkey armed with a pack of gummy bears)
California isnt the rest of the country.
Congested roadways and pollution wasn't invented in California. And they sure as hell don't hold a patent on it, preventing the rest of of the world from abusing it.
You have badly congested roadways because you have bad policies.
If this is merely a policy problem, then that "policy" has been adopted by damn near every other heavily populated country in the world.
Volume is a critical value, as any engineer can attest.
You can use pretty much every component in a stolen iPhone except for the logic board and touchID sensor (which is paired with the logic board).
So stolen phones are still valuable because you can sell the parts...
People know how to strip phones for resale about as much as they know how to strip cars for resale. There's still a very small risk that you'll be targeted by someone who holds these skills. If this could be done by anyone, we probably would have not seen a reduction in phone thefts based on software-based protections.