Interesting article! In reading through it, however, I can't help but wonder what might have happened had he had aimed a bit higher, such as 10K-100K subscribers, rather than 1K-10K?
I actually co-host a Let's Play channel that has about 2.1K subscribers and 1.1 million views, so we'd seemingly be exactly the sort of channel this seller might have targeted. But our channel is nothing more than a fun excuse a few college friends use to keep in touch after we moved apart. Even if we were inclined to respond to a request like his, we don't have the equipment, experience, or skillset to make anything useful to him. And even if we tried, a typical video of ours might only net 30-50 views in the first month; I'd expect that a sponsored video would get even fewer. 1K-10K subscribers aren't mid-sized channels: we're small fries. Even if we wanted to, it should be obvious that we can't realistically influence any significant number of people.
And, at least for our part, we actually have no interest in growing (we've intentionally not monetized the channel in any way, nor sought to do anything to improve viewership; we want it to remain strictly for fun), and I frankly expect that most other channels of similar size are either similarly uninterested or incapable of growth. If he wants a realistic return on his investment, he needs to be talking to channels that have gone through the growing pains from being hobbyists to part-time professionals, rather than the small fries who were literally able to get that big without even trying or giving a care.
I also wonder what would have happened had he had targeted a demographic other than cosplayers (a group known for making a little look like a lot), such as people interested in exotic cuisine or video games? Or if it was a company with the same model, but which sold a different product (e.g. Loot Box or Blue Apron)? Some of his failure might point towards problems other than the ones he thinks he's identified.
That's besides the point. Whether you buy a PS4 game physically from a retailer or digitally via PSN, Sony gets a cut thanks to the licensing fees they charge for the privilege of publishing an officially licensed game for their platform. Likewise with Nintendo and Microsoft. The fact that you can buy a game from a different source doesn't change anything, other than obscuring the fact that the platform creator still gets their cut.
Indeed. As a minority platform, this behavior isn't any more concerning than that of virtually any other closed platform. We see this or similar behavior all the time (e.g. video game handheld and console manufacturers exact license fees from game publishers, retail stores commonly take a 30% cut on all physical goods, white label goods are sold exclusively at particular retailers for prices of their own choosing). It only becomes something worthy of regulatory consideration when consumers can't reasonably switch (i.e. market forces are no longer at play), which typically only happens when/if a company accumulates so much market share that they become the de facto standard that everyone must go through.
As things are today, if Sony charged a high licensing fee, that'd be reflected in the price of their games, which would drive people to buy Xbox Ones. When grocery stores take higher cuts, that's reflected in the prices of the items sold in their store, which drives people to competing grocery stores. When the white label mattresses and large appliances are more expensive at one department store, consumers instead buy comparable mattresses and large appliances online or from other department stores. Nothing about that is problematic in the least. It's simply how things are supposed to work. Likewise, if Apple is taking too large of a cut with iOS apps, there's really nothing substantiative stopping consumers from jumping ship to its thriving competitor: Android.
We may like to talk about "lock-in" with the Apple ecosystem, but the fact is no one is really "locked in" in a meaningful sort of way like what we used to see, say, with PCs in the '80s and '90s, where changing platforms meant going through the laborious process of migrating years of data to apps that functioned wholly differently than those on your original platform. These days, the vast, vast majority of meaningful apps are available for both Android and iOS, the vast majority are comparably priced, and the vast majority of productivity apps either require no data migration or have a documented process for easily doing so. The strongest case for "lock-in" is that you'd likely need to repurchase some apps, but that's nothing more than a sunk cost, rather than actual lock-in (plus, you'd have to do it regardless of which direction you chose to migrate).
There are ideological arguments to be made against closed platforms, to be sure, but those are wholly separate from what's being argued here. At least with regards to this sort of stuff, there's generally nothing wrong about charging people to use something that you created, provided they are reasonably capable of leaving you when and if they are no longer satisfied with that deal.
After loads of research, I picked up a Filco Ninja with Cherry MX Browns for home use, and it's a great, incredibly well-built keyboard that looks and feels beautiful. But at least in my usage, it's nowhere close to being a quiet keyboard. Even when I'm careful to not bottom-out the keys, the people I Skype with complain how noisy it is when I type into shared documents we work on during those calls, and my friends complain just as much when I'm not so carefully spamming keys as we play games together. It's certainly quieter than a Cherry MX Blue keyboard, but as someone who uses non-mechanical keyboards virtually everywhere else in life, I haven't been able to untrain myself from my decades-old habit of bottoming-out, so it will always be incredibly noisy, and even if I could untrain that behavior, I'm not convinced that it will ever be a quiet keyboard. I eventually installed pads on each key to quiet the noisy CLACK whenever I bottom-out. That took the edge off of the noise, but now it's a slightly-less-so-but-still-noisy keyboard that has a terrible feel.
After about five years of trying and trying to make it work, I finally gave up and reassessed my preferences. It didn't take long for me to realize that I strongly prefer incredibly quiet keys with low-travel and low actuation force, and that (though I don't dislike them) the durability and tactile sensation of a mechanical key simply aren't things I care about (especially if they mean it weighs as much as a tank).
A few months back, I finally "downgraded" from my Filco to a Logitech K780 and have been enjoying it immensely. By all objective measures, it's a worse keyboard. The keys are spongy, it feels like it'd break quickly if I used it for self-defense, and the round keycaps are an annoyance, but in all the ways that matter most to me, it's better. I love that it's quiet enough to use in bed when my wife is sleeping, not to mention when I'm on Skype calls. I love that it's lightweight enough to move easily. I love that the keys have an incredibly low travel. I love that it's wireless and that I can switch between multiple devices with the push of a button. I even love the little design consideration that allows you to put tablets or mobile devices in the crease it has along the back so that you can type at them easily.
I so very much want to like mechanical keys, but in the end, I just don't like the ones I've tried so far. I suspect that my "perfect" keyboard might be something like a low-travel Cherry MX Red, but until they're quiet when bottoming-out, I doubt I'll ever go back to a mechanical.
I would expect the long-term average for cases accepted by the Supreme Court to be around 50%, because they only take ones that are close.
I very much agree with everything else you said, but you were off by an order of magnitude with your 50% guess. The actual number of cases that are granted writs of certiorari (i.e. are accepted to be tried before the Supreme Court) is generally around 2-3%.
it would be hard to imagine an incentive for them to do so.
I'll disagree. Once all competing companies in a space achieve parity for a particular feature that isn't getting any better, there really isn't any reason for them to work separately any longer. After all, at that point the front-runners would have lost their competitive advantage, so they'll never see any gain against their competitors come from further investment in that feature. Spending money on that feature would simply be the cost to tread water against their competition, without any ability to actually get ahead.
At that point, why not open the data up? If you can externalize the cost by dumping it on society or, if nothing else, split the cost among everyone in the industry, why wouldn't you? It doesn't cost you anything competitively and it would significantly reduce your costs, allowing you to spend more time and money on the areas where they can help you get ahead better. Plus, if you're the one leading that charge towards openness, you get to define the de facto standard, meaning you can be ahead of everyone else in supporting/do less work to support the new thing.
You're mixing numbers from different years. They have 350 employees now. They made $10.5 in revenue last year. Those numbers would seem to suggest that they are a rapidly growing company. Sure enough, your link mentions that they've had a "dramatic number of recent hires", likely as a response to the 200,000+ new code projects and the seven-fold increase in orders they saw after Microsoft announced it was buying GitHub earlier this year. I'd expect that their revenue for this year will be large enough to support their current employee count.
QoS measures are one thing, but when there's no congestion, no slowdown, and no problem, should it be okay for them to impose arbitrary limits?
I was looking at Cricket's site last night (Cricket is an AT&T subsidiary) and noticed that all of their plans throttle video to 480p. Their limited plans allow users to opt-out of the 480p default (i.e. "It's your data to spend as you want, so it's fine with us if you blow it on HD video"), but their unlimited plans offer no ability to opt-out (i.e. "We're not going to let you blow our data on HD video"), and that's true regardless of network congestion or any other factors.
Now, cellular carriers have never been subject to Net Neutrality regulations in the US (wireless carriers have always been exempted, even before the recent NN repeal), so there's no question that what they're doing here is perfectly legal (at least with regards to NN), but there is a question of whether or not it should be allowed. So, if nothing else, I appreciate that some politicians are trying to shine a light on these practices and raise public awareness of them by making a bit of a stink.
To me, this discussion is as meaningless as asking whether it's "art" when someone uses a paintbrush instead of one's own hands. Of course it is! Swapping tools doesn't suddenly make something not art, even if that tool is very complex.
Separately, there's a discussion in this about who is the artist, but the answer is once again fairly obvious, given that this "AI" is only as capable of "creating" as its creators made it. While far more complex than a pile of rocks, this sort of "AI" is fundamentally no different than hand-carved rocks that have been painted in various colors, put in a bin, and then released so that they roll across a canvas. In both cases, the artist isn't hands-on during the creation process itself, but there's no doubt that they're still the artist and that the thing(s) actually producing the art are merely tools in the figurative hands of that artist.
Whether we're talking about a fractal generator, a motorized spirograph, a Photoshop filter, rocks on a canvas, or an "AI", there's always someone guiding the creative process, either directly or indirectly. Those people are the artists. The thing that makes the art is just the tool.
We can resume this conversation when and if an honest-to-goodness strong AI ever actually arrives, but I'm not holding my breath.
Not only that, the transaction fees are higher as well. I was talking this last week with a friend who owns a small music shop, and he was saying that their credit card processing fees for card-not-present transactions are twice those of card-present transactions. They'll be switching to a new version of their POS system that allows them to associate a card read/swipe with a contract (i.e. each subsequent monthly charge counts as a card-present transaction), rather than having to rely on entering payment information by hand (i.e. monthly charges are treated as card-not-present transactions) from the paper forms that they've been forced to use up to this point.
Despite the cost of the new system, he was visibly excited about the upgrade because their bottom line will improve dramatically overnight, given that rentals are the bulk of their business and are conducted nearly exclusively via credit card. The new POS system should pay for itself in no time, simply on account of what they're losing right now to those processing fees.
Tipping, as implemented in North America (Canada & the US), is pure bullshit. Hospitality workers are basically forced to rely on tips in order to make a livable wage, in many jurisdictions they specifically get shafted (the law specifies a lower minimum wage for restaurant workers than everyone else). As a result, you are culturally "forced" to tip large amounts even just for average/expected service (15%, or whatever is the local custom), because otherwise the people serving you are underpaid.
It's even worse than you think, since you've got your facts a little bit wrong, but the way you got them wrong makes your point more strongly. Specifically, while tipped workers can be given a wage below minimum wage, if they don't receive sufficient tips to reach the equivalent of minimum wage, nationwide law requires that their employer supplement their income to reach minimum wage.
Problem solved, right? We've all been misled about how much of a problem the financial structure around tipping is?
Well, not quite, because there's something like an 85% non-compliance rate nationwide, with no one really having the means to enforce the law in a meaningful way. Servers who speak up frequently find themselves out of workimmediately, whereas an individual enforcement action (as well as a wrongful termination suit, should the server choose to attempt one) can take months or years to reach a resolution, leaving the server high and dry in the meantime.
By that logic, do laws even exist? After all, they're social fabrications that have no physical manifestation in the real world, other than that which we create for them.
My point is, of course these things exist. I'll assent to the notion that "intellectual property" may be a misnomer, since you simply cannot own thoughts in the same way that you can own a physical item, but I've never heard anyone try to use it that way. So far as I've ever heard the term used, "intellectual property" is simply the catch-all phrase used to refer to ideas protected by the sorts of laws you're talking about, be they copyright, trademark, utility/design patent, or some other form of protection. Again, "intellectual property" may not be the best way of referring to those things, but it's the best we've got until a more accurate phrase catches on. Feel free to suggest an alternative.
Now, if people were using the term to argue true ownership over certain thoughts, A) that'd be absurd, and B) I'd agree that we have a problem. Thankfully, so far as I've seen, no one is (yet) making that argument, and I don't think we're on any sort of slippery slope to reaching that point, despite certain aspects of IP law going differently than we would like (e.g. seemingly endless copyright extensions, ambiguous patents, overly aggressive trademark defenses, etc.).
I’ve had a similar experience with my 2013 iPhone 5s. It just received the iOS 12.1 update, which went smoothly, and it feels as if it’s running better than at any point in the last few years. Its (original) battery is no longer able to just barely squeak through a full weekend on a single charge like it could up until earlier this year, but it can still make it through a full day and partway into the next with light use. I may replace the battery at some point this year, but I’m going to try to stretch it to when I upgrade.
I’ve had the money set aside to replace it for a few years now, and I fully intended to replace it this year, but with iOS 12 being so good on it, and with the latest iPhones not really feeling like they offered that much more over last year’s models, I figured I’d give them another year before upgrading.
Good point about it being two steps. I can't say with certainty whether those steps were distinct or done at the same time in the settlements I was party to. In my recollection they were done at once, but if I'm being honest I must admit that it's entirely possible I'm mistaken and that they were actually distinct steps. I can't say with certainty.
And I'll readily agree that there are cases where there is no good outcome. Going back to my initial comment near the top of the thread, I threw those ideas out there, and I still stand by them, but I'll admit that I don't have a surefire way to actually implement them. We live in a broken, messy world where there aren't always clear answers or rules you can follow to reach the ideal outcome. While those harmed should be compensated for the harm done to them, there are situations where that's impossible.
Actually, your experience matches well with most of mine as well.
Take the Playstation Network breach from a few years back, for instance. I was a party to it since I had an account with them at the time that it happened, but my credit card showed no signs of illicit activity after the hack, so I suffered no demonstrable harm. As such, I wasn't entitled to a monetary settlement, but I was entitled to a free game from a list of available options. When the time to finalize things finally arrived, I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork before I could select and claim my game, and I had to do so before a particular date or else my claim would expire. And it seems that I filled it out improperly in some way, since I never received the promised game. That's an example of what I was talking about, with people not bothering with the paperwork (or perhaps not filling it out correctly).
The only thing you said that didn't resonate with me was the mention of the lawyer wanting you to not opt out. I always figured it was the other way around. After all, by the time they're cutting checks, the settlement amount has already been agreed on. At that point it's just a question of how the money is distributed, so any money left on the table by the claimants is money that the lawyers have likely arranged to have redirected to pet projects of theirs (which shouldn't be happening, but such is the world we're in). Towards that end, most of the settlement notices I've received over the years look at first glance like cheap spam. And even if you read them far enough to realize that they aren't, most of them required sending something in (e.g. self-addressed, stamped envelope) or filling out additional paperwork online in order to get a token settlement.
It shouldn't work that way for exactly the reasons you said—they already have your address and know you're part of the class—yet it's almost always what I see. I only recall having received one settlement check that didn't first require some work on my part, whereas I've probably seen between three and five in the last decade that required work on my part.
The jump from a hundred million to a few thousand was in this line:
Towards that end, there's generally a web form where claimants can go to either exclude themselves from the settlement or submit the necessary information to make their claim.
Most people don't bother with the paperwork, so they don't get a portion of the payout.
How do you divide 5 million dollars between 129 million people?
You don't. The 129 million people do it themselves.
At least with the handful of class action settlements I've been a party to, they send out notifications to the people in the class (via e-mail, mail, whatever) indicating that a settlement has been made, that the person may be entitled to a portion of the settlement, and that if the person wants to exclude themselves from the class so as to retain the right to pursue their own suit against the company later, they'll need to say so. Towards that end, there's generally a web form where claimants can go to either exclude themselves from the settlement or submit the necessary information to make their claim.
This is pretty straightforward stuff that's been around for awhile, but most of the time the claim I'm entitled to is too small to even be worth the effort on my part, and I'd wager that's true for the people in this case as well. Setting aside the question of whether the settlement was too small, the fact is, you wouldn't need to send 129 million envelopes with checks. You'd likely only send a few thousand, if even.
So yes, getting a particular behavior declared "bad" is a win.
I wouldn't call it a "win". I'd call it "necessary but not sufficient". As I said, it's a first step, but there's more that needs to be done to right the wrong that was done.
If a lawsuit makes a company stop doing something bad to millions of people, isn't that a good thing?
Getting someone to stop engaging in illegal behavior is step one of setting things right. But there's also a step two: making reparations for harm done. That didn't happen here. Instead, the plaintiff's lawyers arranged for the settlement money to be funneled into groups to which they or their friends belong. Despite millions of people being harmed by Google's behavior, only the three named plaintiffs received even a cent.
Actually, it is probably with Apple, since the second SIM only supports 2g and no MMS
By that logic, your up-to-date browser is at fault for using an old encryption method to talk with a site that hasn't yet been updated to work with newer encryption.
Just as a browser will fallback to an older method in order to talk to a site that hasn't been updated, the eSIM is falling back to what little support it has until the carriers add full support.
Upgrading the RAM in my 2011 Mac mini was as simple as rotating the bottom plate to unlock it, swapping the RAM, then replacing the bottom plate. A novice user could do the whole operation in less than a minute. Likewise with the PowerBook G4 I had when I started college, which only required that I press two release switches at the top of the keyboard in order to gain access to the RAM. Likewise with the iMac my mother had on her desk for years, which hid the RAM behind a small plate that could be removed using a standard screwdriver. Likewise for the MacBook Pro my father currently uses, which hides the RAM behind the laptop's bottom plate, which can be removed in about a minute using a standard screwdriver.
When Apple says components are user serviceable, they've always been genuinely user serviceable. I sincerely doubt they'll start requiring people to come into the store to upgrade such components.
This stands in contrast to parts that they don't advertise as being user serviceable. They'll oftentimes solder them in or engage in otherwise user-hostile designs that make replacing those parts an exercise in frustration. For instance, that Mac mini I mentioned earlier? It had space and hookups for two 2.5" drives since some of their build-to-order options offered multiple drives, but I opted to purchase a version with just one HDD. Upgrading it later with the addition of an SSD in the empty bay was a sub-millimeter precision operation that probably took me the better part of two or three hours and involved basically tearing the entire thing apart.
How about believing both sides? It's an uncontested fact that Apple is withholding payments. Both sides will tell you that. What the reporting here is creatively omitting, however, is any mention of the fact that Apple received permission from the court to place the contested payments, with interest, in an escrow account until the case is resolved, which is standard practice in situations such as these.
Keep in mind how this case started: Qualcomm failed to pay Apple $1 billion in rebates that were owed, seemingly for no reason at all. Those rebates were supposed to cover the fact that Qualcomm was double-dipping with their licensing fees by charging Apple's manufacturers a licensing fee (which then got passed on to Apple) for the right to manufacturer, then charging Apple a licensing fee for the right to sell the exact same IP. So long as Qualcomm kept making those rebate payments, Apple didn't complain. It was only when Qualcomm stopped making those payments that Apple sued for what they were owed and petitioned the court to let them keep the funds in escrow until the conclusion of the case. When Qualcomm pushed back, Apple raised the stakes by using recently-established precedent regarding patent exhaustion to assert that Qualcomm never had the right to demand those payments from Apple in the first place.
But hey, don't let me stop you from relying on logical fallacies to make up your mind. Appeals to authority can be fun. Loaded questions too. To each their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting article! In reading through it, however, I can't help but wonder what might have happened had he had aimed a bit higher, such as 10K-100K subscribers, rather than 1K-10K?
I actually co-host a Let's Play channel that has about 2.1K subscribers and 1.1 million views, so we'd seemingly be exactly the sort of channel this seller might have targeted. But our channel is nothing more than a fun excuse a few college friends use to keep in touch after we moved apart. Even if we were inclined to respond to a request like his, we don't have the equipment, experience, or skillset to make anything useful to him. And even if we tried, a typical video of ours might only net 30-50 views in the first month; I'd expect that a sponsored video would get even fewer. 1K-10K subscribers aren't mid-sized channels: we're small fries. Even if we wanted to, it should be obvious that we can't realistically influence any significant number of people.
And, at least for our part, we actually have no interest in growing (we've intentionally not monetized the channel in any way, nor sought to do anything to improve viewership; we want it to remain strictly for fun), and I frankly expect that most other channels of similar size are either similarly uninterested or incapable of growth. If he wants a realistic return on his investment, he needs to be talking to channels that have gone through the growing pains from being hobbyists to part-time professionals, rather than the small fries who were literally able to get that big without even trying or giving a care.
I also wonder what would have happened had he had targeted a demographic other than cosplayers (a group known for making a little look like a lot), such as people interested in exotic cuisine or video games? Or if it was a company with the same model, but which sold a different product (e.g. Loot Box or Blue Apron)? Some of his failure might point towards problems other than the ones he thinks he's identified.
That's besides the point. Whether you buy a PS4 game physically from a retailer or digitally via PSN, Sony gets a cut thanks to the licensing fees they charge for the privilege of publishing an officially licensed game for their platform. Likewise with Nintendo and Microsoft. The fact that you can buy a game from a different source doesn't change anything, other than obscuring the fact that the platform creator still gets their cut.
Indeed. As a minority platform, this behavior isn't any more concerning than that of virtually any other closed platform. We see this or similar behavior all the time (e.g. video game handheld and console manufacturers exact license fees from game publishers, retail stores commonly take a 30% cut on all physical goods, white label goods are sold exclusively at particular retailers for prices of their own choosing). It only becomes something worthy of regulatory consideration when consumers can't reasonably switch (i.e. market forces are no longer at play), which typically only happens when/if a company accumulates so much market share that they become the de facto standard that everyone must go through.
As things are today, if Sony charged a high licensing fee, that'd be reflected in the price of their games, which would drive people to buy Xbox Ones. When grocery stores take higher cuts, that's reflected in the prices of the items sold in their store, which drives people to competing grocery stores. When the white label mattresses and large appliances are more expensive at one department store, consumers instead buy comparable mattresses and large appliances online or from other department stores. Nothing about that is problematic in the least. It's simply how things are supposed to work. Likewise, if Apple is taking too large of a cut with iOS apps, there's really nothing substantiative stopping consumers from jumping ship to its thriving competitor: Android.
We may like to talk about "lock-in" with the Apple ecosystem, but the fact is no one is really "locked in" in a meaningful sort of way like what we used to see, say, with PCs in the '80s and '90s, where changing platforms meant going through the laborious process of migrating years of data to apps that functioned wholly differently than those on your original platform. These days, the vast, vast majority of meaningful apps are available for both Android and iOS, the vast majority are comparably priced, and the vast majority of productivity apps either require no data migration or have a documented process for easily doing so. The strongest case for "lock-in" is that you'd likely need to repurchase some apps, but that's nothing more than a sunk cost, rather than actual lock-in (plus, you'd have to do it regardless of which direction you chose to migrate).
There are ideological arguments to be made against closed platforms, to be sure, but those are wholly separate from what's being argued here. At least with regards to this sort of stuff, there's generally nothing wrong about charging people to use something that you created, provided they are reasonably capable of leaving you when and if they are no longer satisfied with that deal.
After loads of research, I picked up a Filco Ninja with Cherry MX Browns for home use, and it's a great, incredibly well-built keyboard that looks and feels beautiful. But at least in my usage, it's nowhere close to being a quiet keyboard. Even when I'm careful to not bottom-out the keys, the people I Skype with complain how noisy it is when I type into shared documents we work on during those calls, and my friends complain just as much when I'm not so carefully spamming keys as we play games together. It's certainly quieter than a Cherry MX Blue keyboard, but as someone who uses non-mechanical keyboards virtually everywhere else in life, I haven't been able to untrain myself from my decades-old habit of bottoming-out, so it will always be incredibly noisy, and even if I could untrain that behavior, I'm not convinced that it will ever be a quiet keyboard. I eventually installed pads on each key to quiet the noisy CLACK whenever I bottom-out. That took the edge off of the noise, but now it's a slightly-less-so-but-still-noisy keyboard that has a terrible feel.
After about five years of trying and trying to make it work, I finally gave up and reassessed my preferences. It didn't take long for me to realize that I strongly prefer incredibly quiet keys with low-travel and low actuation force, and that (though I don't dislike them) the durability and tactile sensation of a mechanical key simply aren't things I care about (especially if they mean it weighs as much as a tank).
A few months back, I finally "downgraded" from my Filco to a Logitech K780 and have been enjoying it immensely. By all objective measures, it's a worse keyboard. The keys are spongy, it feels like it'd break quickly if I used it for self-defense, and the round keycaps are an annoyance, but in all the ways that matter most to me, it's better. I love that it's quiet enough to use in bed when my wife is sleeping, not to mention when I'm on Skype calls. I love that it's lightweight enough to move easily. I love that the keys have an incredibly low travel. I love that it's wireless and that I can switch between multiple devices with the push of a button. I even love the little design consideration that allows you to put tablets or mobile devices in the crease it has along the back so that you can type at them easily.
I so very much want to like mechanical keys, but in the end, I just don't like the ones I've tried so far. I suspect that my "perfect" keyboard might be something like a low-travel Cherry MX Red, but until they're quiet when bottoming-out, I doubt I'll ever go back to a mechanical.
I would expect the long-term average for cases accepted by the Supreme Court to be around 50%, because they only take ones that are close.
I very much agree with everything else you said, but you were off by an order of magnitude with your 50% guess. The actual number of cases that are granted writs of certiorari (i.e. are accepted to be tried before the Supreme Court) is generally around 2-3%.
https://supremecourtpress.com/...
it would be hard to imagine an incentive for them to do so.
I'll disagree. Once all competing companies in a space achieve parity for a particular feature that isn't getting any better, there really isn't any reason for them to work separately any longer. After all, at that point the front-runners would have lost their competitive advantage, so they'll never see any gain against their competitors come from further investment in that feature. Spending money on that feature would simply be the cost to tread water against their competition, without any ability to actually get ahead.
At that point, why not open the data up? If you can externalize the cost by dumping it on society or, if nothing else, split the cost among everyone in the industry, why wouldn't you? It doesn't cost you anything competitively and it would significantly reduce your costs, allowing you to spend more time and money on the areas where they can help you get ahead better. Plus, if you're the one leading that charge towards openness, you get to define the de facto standard, meaning you can be ahead of everyone else in supporting/do less work to support the new thing.
Challenge accepted.
-- Microsoft
You're mixing numbers from different years. They have 350 employees now. They made $10.5 in revenue last year. Those numbers would seem to suggest that they are a rapidly growing company. Sure enough, your link mentions that they've had a "dramatic number of recent hires", likely as a response to the 200,000+ new code projects and the seven-fold increase in orders they saw after Microsoft announced it was buying GitHub earlier this year. I'd expect that their revenue for this year will be large enough to support their current employee count.
Agreed all around. I just didn’t see a point in spelling all of that out, since I assumed my audience understood those distinctions already.
QoS measures are one thing, but when there's no congestion, no slowdown, and no problem, should it be okay for them to impose arbitrary limits?
I was looking at Cricket's site last night (Cricket is an AT&T subsidiary) and noticed that all of their plans throttle video to 480p. Their limited plans allow users to opt-out of the 480p default (i.e. "It's your data to spend as you want, so it's fine with us if you blow it on HD video"), but their unlimited plans offer no ability to opt-out (i.e. "We're not going to let you blow our data on HD video"), and that's true regardless of network congestion or any other factors.
Now, cellular carriers have never been subject to Net Neutrality regulations in the US (wireless carriers have always been exempted, even before the recent NN repeal), so there's no question that what they're doing here is perfectly legal (at least with regards to NN), but there is a question of whether or not it should be allowed. So, if nothing else, I appreciate that some politicians are trying to shine a light on these practices and raise public awareness of them by making a bit of a stink.
To me, this discussion is as meaningless as asking whether it's "art" when someone uses a paintbrush instead of one's own hands. Of course it is! Swapping tools doesn't suddenly make something not art, even if that tool is very complex.
Separately, there's a discussion in this about who is the artist, but the answer is once again fairly obvious, given that this "AI" is only as capable of "creating" as its creators made it. While far more complex than a pile of rocks, this sort of "AI" is fundamentally no different than hand-carved rocks that have been painted in various colors, put in a bin, and then released so that they roll across a canvas. In both cases, the artist isn't hands-on during the creation process itself, but there's no doubt that they're still the artist and that the thing(s) actually producing the art are merely tools in the figurative hands of that artist.
Whether we're talking about a fractal generator, a motorized spirograph, a Photoshop filter, rocks on a canvas, or an "AI", there's always someone guiding the creative process, either directly or indirectly. Those people are the artists. The thing that makes the art is just the tool.
We can resume this conversation when and if an honest-to-goodness strong AI ever actually arrives, but I'm not holding my breath.
Not only that, the transaction fees are higher as well. I was talking this last week with a friend who owns a small music shop, and he was saying that their credit card processing fees for card-not-present transactions are twice those of card-present transactions. They'll be switching to a new version of their POS system that allows them to associate a card read/swipe with a contract (i.e. each subsequent monthly charge counts as a card-present transaction), rather than having to rely on entering payment information by hand (i.e. monthly charges are treated as card-not-present transactions) from the paper forms that they've been forced to use up to this point.
Despite the cost of the new system, he was visibly excited about the upgrade because their bottom line will improve dramatically overnight, given that rentals are the bulk of their business and are conducted nearly exclusively via credit card. The new POS system should pay for itself in no time, simply on account of what they're losing right now to those processing fees.
Tipping, as implemented in North America (Canada & the US), is pure bullshit. Hospitality workers are basically forced to rely on tips in order to make a livable wage, in many jurisdictions they specifically get shafted (the law specifies a lower minimum wage for restaurant workers than everyone else). As a result, you are culturally "forced" to tip large amounts even just for average/expected service (15%, or whatever is the local custom), because otherwise the people serving you are underpaid.
It's even worse than you think, since you've got your facts a little bit wrong, but the way you got them wrong makes your point more strongly. Specifically, while tipped workers can be given a wage below minimum wage, if they don't receive sufficient tips to reach the equivalent of minimum wage, nationwide law requires that their employer supplement their income to reach minimum wage.
Problem solved, right? We've all been misled about how much of a problem the financial structure around tipping is?
Well, not quite, because there's something like an 85% non-compliance rate nationwide, with no one really having the means to enforce the law in a meaningful way. Servers who speak up frequently find themselves out of workimmediately, whereas an individual enforcement action (as well as a wrongful termination suit, should the server choose to attempt one) can take months or years to reach a resolution, leaving the server high and dry in the meantime.
As you said, it really is BS.
By that logic, do laws even exist? After all, they're social fabrications that have no physical manifestation in the real world, other than that which we create for them.
My point is, of course these things exist. I'll assent to the notion that "intellectual property" may be a misnomer, since you simply cannot own thoughts in the same way that you can own a physical item, but I've never heard anyone try to use it that way. So far as I've ever heard the term used, "intellectual property" is simply the catch-all phrase used to refer to ideas protected by the sorts of laws you're talking about, be they copyright, trademark, utility/design patent, or some other form of protection. Again, "intellectual property" may not be the best way of referring to those things, but it's the best we've got until a more accurate phrase catches on. Feel free to suggest an alternative.
Now, if people were using the term to argue true ownership over certain thoughts, A) that'd be absurd, and B) I'd agree that we have a problem. Thankfully, so far as I've seen, no one is (yet) making that argument, and I don't think we're on any sort of slippery slope to reaching that point, despite certain aspects of IP law going differently than we would like (e.g. seemingly endless copyright extensions, ambiguous patents, overly aggressive trademark defenses, etc.).
I’ve had a similar experience with my 2013 iPhone 5s. It just received the iOS 12.1 update, which went smoothly, and it feels as if it’s running better than at any point in the last few years. Its (original) battery is no longer able to just barely squeak through a full weekend on a single charge like it could up until earlier this year, but it can still make it through a full day and partway into the next with light use. I may replace the battery at some point this year, but I’m going to try to stretch it to when I upgrade.
I’ve had the money set aside to replace it for a few years now, and I fully intended to replace it this year, but with iOS 12 being so good on it, and with the latest iPhones not really feeling like they offered that much more over last year’s models, I figured I’d give them another year before upgrading.
Good point about it being two steps. I can't say with certainty whether those steps were distinct or done at the same time in the settlements I was party to. In my recollection they were done at once, but if I'm being honest I must admit that it's entirely possible I'm mistaken and that they were actually distinct steps. I can't say with certainty.
And I'll readily agree that there are cases where there is no good outcome. Going back to my initial comment near the top of the thread, I threw those ideas out there, and I still stand by them, but I'll admit that I don't have a surefire way to actually implement them. We live in a broken, messy world where there aren't always clear answers or rules you can follow to reach the ideal outcome. While those harmed should be compensated for the harm done to them, there are situations where that's impossible.
Actually, your experience matches well with most of mine as well.
Take the Playstation Network breach from a few years back, for instance. I was a party to it since I had an account with them at the time that it happened, but my credit card showed no signs of illicit activity after the hack, so I suffered no demonstrable harm. As such, I wasn't entitled to a monetary settlement, but I was entitled to a free game from a list of available options. When the time to finalize things finally arrived, I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork before I could select and claim my game, and I had to do so before a particular date or else my claim would expire. And it seems that I filled it out improperly in some way, since I never received the promised game. That's an example of what I was talking about, with people not bothering with the paperwork (or perhaps not filling it out correctly).
The only thing you said that didn't resonate with me was the mention of the lawyer wanting you to not opt out. I always figured it was the other way around. After all, by the time they're cutting checks, the settlement amount has already been agreed on. At that point it's just a question of how the money is distributed, so any money left on the table by the claimants is money that the lawyers have likely arranged to have redirected to pet projects of theirs (which shouldn't be happening, but such is the world we're in). Towards that end, most of the settlement notices I've received over the years look at first glance like cheap spam. And even if you read them far enough to realize that they aren't, most of them required sending something in (e.g. self-addressed, stamped envelope) or filling out additional paperwork online in order to get a token settlement.
It shouldn't work that way for exactly the reasons you said—they already have your address and know you're part of the class—yet it's almost always what I see. I only recall having received one settlement check that didn't first require some work on my part, whereas I've probably seen between three and five in the last decade that required work on my part.
The jump from a hundred million to a few thousand was in this line:
Towards that end, there's generally a web form where claimants can go to either exclude themselves from the settlement or submit the necessary information to make their claim.
Most people don't bother with the paperwork, so they don't get a portion of the payout.
How do you divide 5 million dollars between 129 million people?
You don't. The 129 million people do it themselves.
At least with the handful of class action settlements I've been a party to, they send out notifications to the people in the class (via e-mail, mail, whatever) indicating that a settlement has been made, that the person may be entitled to a portion of the settlement, and that if the person wants to exclude themselves from the class so as to retain the right to pursue their own suit against the company later, they'll need to say so. Towards that end, there's generally a web form where claimants can go to either exclude themselves from the settlement or submit the necessary information to make their claim.
This is pretty straightforward stuff that's been around for awhile, but most of the time the claim I'm entitled to is too small to even be worth the effort on my part, and I'd wager that's true for the people in this case as well. Setting aside the question of whether the settlement was too small, the fact is, you wouldn't need to send 129 million envelopes with checks. You'd likely only send a few thousand, if even.
So yes, getting a particular behavior declared "bad" is a win.
I wouldn't call it a "win". I'd call it "necessary but not sufficient". As I said, it's a first step, but there's more that needs to be done to right the wrong that was done.
If a lawsuit makes a company stop doing something bad to millions of people, isn't that a good thing?
Getting someone to stop engaging in illegal behavior is step one of setting things right. But there's also a step two: making reparations for harm done. That didn't happen here. Instead, the plaintiff's lawyers arranged for the settlement money to be funneled into groups to which they or their friends belong. Despite millions of people being harmed by Google's behavior, only the three named plaintiffs received even a cent.
To be fair, they said it doesn't work on the camera because the camera's view isn't exactly problematic when the lid is closed. ;)
Actually, it is probably with Apple, since the second SIM only supports 2g and no MMS
By that logic, your up-to-date browser is at fault for using an old encryption method to talk with a site that hasn't yet been updated to work with newer encryption.
Just as a browser will fallback to an older method in order to talk to a site that hasn't been updated, the eSIM is falling back to what little support it has until the carriers add full support.
Upgrading the RAM in my 2011 Mac mini was as simple as rotating the bottom plate to unlock it, swapping the RAM, then replacing the bottom plate. A novice user could do the whole operation in less than a minute. Likewise with the PowerBook G4 I had when I started college, which only required that I press two release switches at the top of the keyboard in order to gain access to the RAM. Likewise with the iMac my mother had on her desk for years, which hid the RAM behind a small plate that could be removed using a standard screwdriver. Likewise for the MacBook Pro my father currently uses, which hides the RAM behind the laptop's bottom plate, which can be removed in about a minute using a standard screwdriver.
When Apple says components are user serviceable, they've always been genuinely user serviceable. I sincerely doubt they'll start requiring people to come into the store to upgrade such components.
This stands in contrast to parts that they don't advertise as being user serviceable. They'll oftentimes solder them in or engage in otherwise user-hostile designs that make replacing those parts an exercise in frustration. For instance, that Mac mini I mentioned earlier? It had space and hookups for two 2.5" drives since some of their build-to-order options offered multiple drives, but I opted to purchase a version with just one HDD. Upgrading it later with the addition of an SSD in the empty bay was a sub-millimeter precision operation that probably took me the better part of two or three hours and involved basically tearing the entire thing apart.
How about believing both sides? It's an uncontested fact that Apple is withholding payments. Both sides will tell you that. What the reporting here is creatively omitting, however, is any mention of the fact that Apple received permission from the court to place the contested payments, with interest, in an escrow account until the case is resolved, which is standard practice in situations such as these.
Keep in mind how this case started: Qualcomm failed to pay Apple $1 billion in rebates that were owed, seemingly for no reason at all. Those rebates were supposed to cover the fact that Qualcomm was double-dipping with their licensing fees by charging Apple's manufacturers a licensing fee (which then got passed on to Apple) for the right to manufacturer, then charging Apple a licensing fee for the right to sell the exact same IP. So long as Qualcomm kept making those rebate payments, Apple didn't complain. It was only when Qualcomm stopped making those payments that Apple sued for what they were owed and petitioned the court to let them keep the funds in escrow until the conclusion of the case. When Qualcomm pushed back, Apple raised the stakes by using recently-established precedent regarding patent exhaustion to assert that Qualcomm never had the right to demand those payments from Apple in the first place.
But hey, don't let me stop you from relying on logical fallacies to make up your mind. Appeals to authority can be fun. Loaded questions too. To each their own.