The Finnish Social Insurance Institution (KELA), i.e the people who manage social security and other benefits payments, has been a massive hassle to deal with that constantly screws things up for as long as I can remember. Anyone who's dealt with them to any significant extent will have personal horror stories to share so and they're more or less universally reviled. Thus it's pretty clear that these people are happier most probably because they don't have to deal with KELA, not because of the unconditional benefits payment.
Mired in controversy? Sure, but only of the blown-spectacularly-out-of-proportion-for-clicks kind of controversy.
With Kjellberg these involve a joke by comparing some people to nazis, sharing a video by someone who's made videos doing the same, trying to see if people on a service called "Fiverr" will do very inappropriate things for next to nothing and blurting out a bad word in the middle of a live stream. In the latter two cases he immediately apologized for it and in the case of the Fiverr video he apologized downright profusely when he thought the people would have refused, but didn't.
Claiming that Portugal "legalized" drugs is a bit misleading when what they de-criminalized was the possession of quantities clearly meant for personal consumption. The Netherlands did something similar, sans the extra money and effort into drug awareness and treatment, several years prior and they're well ahead of European averages in drug use and deaths. Not only that, in some parts of the country the police spends more than half of their time going after warring drug gangs.
In other words it's kind of clear that what helped wasn't de-criminzalization, it was taking treatment and public awareness more seriously by funding it better. If you actually ask young people over there who have been subject to their public awareness campaigns in school they're typically going to tell you that they don't even want to do drugs (including light stuff like hash). I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the success of the public awareness campaigns warning people of the dangers of doing drugs is the main reason why Portugal is so well below the average in terms of drug use and deaths.
Other than that there's also the fact that we're talking about a western European country with a healthcare system that isn't driven for profit, where they monitor doctors' prescriptions of drugs with a risk of being misused recreationally and where advertising any prescription drugs to consumers is strictly forbidden (so patients don't even demand opiates like they do in the U.S). I'm from Finland, which is very similar in these regards, and one of the things my dad, a doctor with well over 30 years experience, finds absolutely abhorrent about the U.S system is the way in which prescription drugs are advertised on directly to consumers. When he went to a conference a few years ago he genuinely couldn't believe his eyes when he turned on the TV and saw an ad for a prescription drug (which I think was a painkiller with a serious risk of addiction).
Can't imagine there's much of a difference in food, housing, work stress, workplace accidents or homicide (which is AFAIK is only a really big killer for black men, who are mostly killed by each other). Only thing that I can think of is the effect of hispanic men being more likely to be working manual labor and thus getting more exercise. Particularly ones that emigrate into the U.S as adults have probably spend their childhood getting a good amount of exercise as it's known that childhood exercise has beneficial effects that last well into adulthood.
Come to think of it, seeing how these figures are based on the information of people who have died, a childhood and early adulthood spent elsewhere could explain a good chunk of the "death gap" between white and hispanic men. Less time to clog up your arteries and destroy your internal organs with unhealthy food, less time to get prescribed opioid painkillers unnecessarily and be addicted to them, less time to have the effects of a sedimentary lifestyle set in, less time to be subject to all kinds of carcinogenic and otherwise unhealthy compounds in the environment, etc.
Still, a race-based cause-of-death breakdown would probably be necessary to turn this from guessing to anything more concrete.
China only pushing around it's immediate neighbors isn't because it doesn't want to, but because it doesn't have the force projection to do so just yet, with yet being the operative word.
Not only have they already started setting up bases outside of the asian subcontinent, they're also investing heavily into aircraft carriers. Other than the originally Ukranian built sister ship to Russia's only carrier they've refitted and gotten into service, they've got a domestically built version of the same design undergoing sea trials and a third domestic design with CATOBAR launching under construction. Some reports say that they've also got two nuclear-powered ones under construction, but I'm not fully convinced of those reports' accuracy.
The point is that China doesn't go around acting like world police because it doesn't want to, but because it can't do it just yet. Give it a decade and you can be sure that they will absolutely be competing with the U.S in doing what the U.S has been doing since WW2.
People shouldn't be all that surprised about it considering how despite outwardly being very high tech, the Japanese can be surprisingly low-tech in many regards.
One good example of this is how email hasn't become as commonplace as it has in most of the developed world. No, people in Japan, particularly companies, instead chose to use fax machines to achieve the same tasks as it was still the 1980s. Another example is that the very old fashioned hierarchies within companies allows bosses to be exactly like this computer illiterate cyber security chief. While this may seem really odd to us westerners, it's perfectly normal over there.
As for how someone so ill fitted for the job has been given said job, it's more to do with how jobs like his are first and foremost given out based on party affiliation rather than aptitude for the job or any kind of merit. It sort of makes you wonder if it was better that rather than having political appointees actually run government organizations like this, limit political appointees within them to oversight roles rather than active management.
I'm not fully convinced that's because of the taxes they actually pay and not because the politicians in the Country Club party that pretend to be on their side tell them to.
Considering how we're talking about a method where we release individuals of a particular species with sabotaged genes into the wild so that they then breed with the the wild population and spread these sabotaged genes across the population trough natural procreation I don't think this has much of a risk of jumping across species.
Worst case scenario is that this spreads beyond the intended target population and you end up exterminating additional populations of the same species.
The issue here is not what the local government can pull in terms of taxes, but the effects for the people already living in the area. It's pretty easy to find textbook examples of this going badly wrong as you only need to look at all of the big tech hotspots and areas with a manageable commute to them. Tech workers pay a lot of taxes, but because of the massive increase in housing cost a lot of particularly lower class people have had no choice but to leave the area they grew up in.
This is also neglecting the issue that workers may end up commuting from outside of the area that's giving them the tax break Boise-style to save money or be able to buy a bigger house, meaning that they obviously don't get any additional tax revenue from these people. In this case all they're getting from the deal is more wear and tear on their infrastructure.
Smart or dumb depends on what they're trying to achieve while holding public office. If the goal is for the benefit of the people living there then they're obviously morons, but it's pretty clear that like most U.S politicians the goal is self-enrichment in which case they're doing a very good job at it and can't really be called morons.
The way I see things it's more like: "Most Americans either want either better benefits or lower taxes, but neither wants to actually pay for it". Those wanting more benefits, primarily poor people, want it paid by increasing taxes on particularly the rich and the people who want lower taxes, primarily rich people, want it paid by cutting benefits.
As much as people in the U.S don't want to talk about class struggles, the reality is that much of U.S politics is pretty much exactly that. The main thing that limit's the extent to which it is the case one of the parties in the two party duopoly is a Country Club party pure and simple while the other sits somewhere in the middle between a Country Club party and a European-style Socialist party.
That's what I was thinking... Why bother when it's beyond obvious that it's really nothing beyond an opportunity for politicians to do some grandstanding? Because that's what happens whenever the executives of a company in the midst of a scandal is asked to come testify before a panel of politicians.
Alternatively it's do with how Chinese citizens have the Great Firewall of China to contend with. Compared to countries where people don't have something like that to contend with Chinese citizens are obviously going to be more interested in VPNs and other techniques to go around it, hence a lot of Chinese VPN services.
Oh and a population of that exceeds the population of the U.S by over a billion...
In my experience that "valuable thing to share" is all to often related some truly ancient system that should have been put to pasture long ago, but the older worker has decided to keep nursing it along and of course not documenting their myriad of hacks to keep it going. One of the first things I did out of university was documenting something like this after the developer's chain smoking had caught up with them and they'd died to assist in the effort to re-engineer this system using off-the-shelf components rather than the bespoke components they'd insisted on using.
The usual response that I get when I bring up this story is a lot of angry comments from older people about how I supposedly helped replace the system with something worse for the sake of replacing it, but it truly as an out-of-date mess. However the new system I took part in developing, with a team where I was still the youngest and the oldest workers were in their 40s, was well documented from the get-go, way better structured and superior in pretty much every conceivable regard.
Come to think of it... My experience with baby boomers is that they're typically very bad at documenting things. I've worked with people randing from university students to baby boomers and the latter is always the group that I find it hardest to work with due to things like no documentation, badly structured code (read: spagetti code), lacking communication skills and insistence on using deprecated APIs and libaries. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those 20-somethings that can't work with anyone not roughly their age, but for some reason I've found that people get and better at their jobs reaching an apex at some point in their 40s whereafter they start getting worse at all of things I've mentioned and by the time they reach their 60s working with them is an absolutely abysmal experience for the reasons that I mentioned. Writing code that's not meant to be maintained by anyone except you for as long as you can remember how you did it seems to be the norm and not the exception for people in their 60s.
I don't think clickbait and trolling is even twitter's biggest problem. No, the original 140 character limit made having a meaningful conversation so difficult most people weren't even going to bother and even after they increased it to a slightly less meaning-restricting 260 the culture was already set.
As much as Dorsey may talk about how what matters are the meaningful conversations, the reality is that it's always been a narcissistic point scoring game where what really matters is your popularity, which is measured in your follower count. To fix this would require some massive changes that would then in turn alienate most of their users, so fixing it is basically a Catch 22. Do nothing and it continues to be one of the most toxic places on the internet, but fix it and you're going to lose a lot of your users because it's ceased to be the toxic snakepit they enjoyed.
Seems like those figures aren't including convertibles as those have been selling pretty well and have made some major inroads into the laptop market. The drop-off in tablet sales probably has a lot to do with how convertibles offer both the tablet form factor and the utility of a laptop whenever needed.
However the main reason for the continued drop-off in pure tablet sales has probably more to do with how there was a single big surge in interest in 2012-2013 and the people who bought in haven't had any compelling reason to upgrade since then. I bought my first tablet, an original Nexus 7, back in 2012 and when I finally got to replacing it earlier this year I found that the decently priced alternatives weren't that big of an upgrade and the ones that were came with an iPad-like price tag. Ended up getting a leftover stock Nexus 9 for just over 100 euros which should probably serve me for another few years.
I suspect most of the people making these prank calls are doing so reflexively because Trump is strong on fighting illegal immigration rather than there being an actual thought process behind it.
It seems like the American left as a whole seems to have fallen into the same, completely counter-productive, reactionary "If you're going to zig, we're going to zag"-mindset that the Republicans fell into when Obama was in office. The fact that the Republicans control both houses and the president's office would suggest that it may work if going by seats gained, but going by actual policy made it obviously didn't work until they got control of it all.
My suspicion is that it's probably not too dissimilar to the Polybius arcade game hoax, where a surprisingly convincing story was created by weaving together from real world events like MK Ultra program, urban legends and mythology that got quite famous in the early 2000s. In this case it's a number of news stories that when combined also make up a pretty convincing story, but most importantly one that is very hard to conclusively disprove.
In other words this story seems to be an amalgamation of the following things:
1. The Snowden leaks showing that the NSA had developed tech and procedures to intercept CISCO network hardware so that they could open up the boxes, install very hard to detect bugs in the firmware and then re-seal the boxes using seals forged by the NSA. It is generally thought that the NSA is probably not the only one that has been doing this.
2. Very severe firmware vulnerabilities found in SuperMicro motherboards around 2015. Not only were these and SuperMicro's inability to fully fix the vulnerabilities well publicized, so was the fact that may companies, Apple included, actually removed these machines from their systems because of the security threat they posed.
3. Simple computers the size of a grain of rice being presented to the world around 2015 and gaining a lot of media attention, even going as far as making the cover of Popular Mechanics. While these systems were really just smart sensors with a heavy level of miniaturization, people have for years been talking about more devious uses for the same technology.
4. Widespread and well documented cases of cyber attack and espionage activities aimed at many American companies and government agencies by both private and national level entities in China. It's less one specific attack and more a barrage of attacks and attempts at them over the last decade or so.
Add all of these up and you probably don't even need any malicious intent to make up a story like this, thou it probably will speed up the process. Conspiracy theorists after all pull together stories way more intricate than this from way less concrete source material so it's not implausible that this is just incompetence rather than malice. However I don't fault anyone for leaning either way as to how this conspiracy theory or game of telephone came to happen.
That's what the people who push them keep insisting, but the reality is that projects tend to deal with the kinds of things that CoCs are supposed to be for just fine without one. However more worryingly CoCs have been used in the past to settle grudges over things well outside of the project, usually disagreements on politically contentious issues.
Ummm.... You people do know that Semiaccurate is a kind of notorious for being run by an insanely zealous AMD fanboy? We're talking about the same person who made some absolutely crazy misreading of a number of documents to arrive at a conclusion that Nvidia's Fermi architecture had sub 5% yields as devices based on that architecture were shipping in good numbers.
A reliable source this is not, particularly when it comes to AMD's or it's direct competitors, so wait for some more trustworthy sources before making your mind up on this subject.
While not everyone who has chosen to die their hair some color straight off a neon sign or fill their face with obnoxious piercings behaves this way, they are surprisingly prevalent among the kinds of people who practically live to stir up completely unnecessary drama.
My personal suspicion is that this comes from the same source, an excessively attention seeking personality that doesn't really care about the effects of that behavior on others around them. To them it doesn't matter that they're wasting everyone's time with petty bickering, instead what matters is that they get to be at the center of attention.
I'm personally starting to wonder if the solution to this is to conduct open source development using unique project-specific pseudonyms where nobody knows who anybody else is or anything about them and thus any controversy is severely limited. In a system all that matters is the quality of your work and if you're just going to try to stir up unnecessary arguments and infighting the threshold to kick you out of the project is going to be very low.
Sounds to me like Google really didn't like the EU hampering their vertical integration plans and are retaliating by raising the costs of smartphones to people living in the EU area. Then again if you are a company with a motto as benign as "Don't be evil" only to get rid of it then retaliation is probably going to be your standard response to consumer protection laws being enforced.
The specific number seems to be based on the idea that they're going to be losing all revenue from advertising and datamining operations and are simply pulling in that revenue directly from users as a single up-front payment. For comparison's sake Facebook's per-user revenues were about $20 in 2017 so that's probably two year's revenue from datamining and in-app advertising trough Google APIs.
The fact that Apple only has 15% of the market while Google basically owns the rest of it? Because the specific charge the EU is levelling against Google is abuse of dominant market position and this is how they define it:
I always assumed that the idea was to sell the brand names to someone who would then license that brand name to companies like those operating the Toys 'R Us stores in Europe. Actual stores and inventory that hasn't already been liquidated is obviously going to be auctioned off as planned and thus the only change to the plan is that it's the creditors themselves, or more specifically a company set up by them for this purpose, who are going to be licensing out the name rather than somebody else.
If this goes trough some old stores will probably re-open, but they'll be under new ownership and just licensing the brand rather than actual Toys 'R Us stores and may incorporate some major changes in concept. However more probably than not most of the stores will just be generic toy stores with a new brand to draw in customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Finn here BTW.
The Finnish Social Insurance Institution (KELA), i.e the people who manage social security and other benefits payments, has been a massive hassle to deal with that constantly screws things up for as long as I can remember. Anyone who's dealt with them to any significant extent will have personal horror stories to share so and they're more or less universally reviled. Thus it's pretty clear that these people are happier most probably because they don't have to deal with KELA, not because of the unconditional benefits payment.
Mired in controversy? Sure, but only of the blown-spectacularly-out-of-proportion-for-clicks kind of controversy.
With Kjellberg these involve a joke by comparing some people to nazis, sharing a video by someone who's made videos doing the same, trying to see if people on a service called "Fiverr" will do very inappropriate things for next to nothing and blurting out a bad word in the middle of a live stream. In the latter two cases he immediately apologized for it and in the case of the Fiverr video he apologized downright profusely when he thought the people would have refused, but didn't.
Claiming that Portugal "legalized" drugs is a bit misleading when what they de-criminalized was the possession of quantities clearly meant for personal consumption. The Netherlands did something similar, sans the extra money and effort into drug awareness and treatment, several years prior and they're well ahead of European averages in drug use and deaths. Not only that, in some parts of the country the police spends more than half of their time going after warring drug gangs.
In other words it's kind of clear that what helped wasn't de-criminzalization, it was taking treatment and public awareness more seriously by funding it better. If you actually ask young people over there who have been subject to their public awareness campaigns in school they're typically going to tell you that they don't even want to do drugs (including light stuff like hash). I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the success of the public awareness campaigns warning people of the dangers of doing drugs is the main reason why Portugal is so well below the average in terms of drug use and deaths.
Other than that there's also the fact that we're talking about a western European country with a healthcare system that isn't driven for profit, where they monitor doctors' prescriptions of drugs with a risk of being misused recreationally and where advertising any prescription drugs to consumers is strictly forbidden (so patients don't even demand opiates like they do in the U.S). I'm from Finland, which is very similar in these regards, and one of the things my dad, a doctor with well over 30 years experience, finds absolutely abhorrent about the U.S system is the way in which prescription drugs are advertised on directly to consumers. When he went to a conference a few years ago he genuinely couldn't believe his eyes when he turned on the TV and saw an ad for a prescription drug (which I think was a painkiller with a serious risk of addiction).
Can't imagine there's much of a difference in food, housing, work stress, workplace accidents or homicide (which is AFAIK is only a really big killer for black men, who are mostly killed by each other). Only thing that I can think of is the effect of hispanic men being more likely to be working manual labor and thus getting more exercise. Particularly ones that emigrate into the U.S as adults have probably spend their childhood getting a good amount of exercise as it's known that childhood exercise has beneficial effects that last well into adulthood.
Come to think of it, seeing how these figures are based on the information of people who have died, a childhood and early adulthood spent elsewhere could explain a good chunk of the "death gap" between white and hispanic men. Less time to clog up your arteries and destroy your internal organs with unhealthy food, less time to get prescribed opioid painkillers unnecessarily and be addicted to them, less time to have the effects of a sedimentary lifestyle set in, less time to be subject to all kinds of carcinogenic and otherwise unhealthy compounds in the environment, etc.
Still, a race-based cause-of-death breakdown would probably be necessary to turn this from guessing to anything more concrete.
China only pushing around it's immediate neighbors isn't because it doesn't want to, but because it doesn't have the force projection to do so just yet, with yet being the operative word.
Not only have they already started setting up bases outside of the asian subcontinent, they're also investing heavily into aircraft carriers. Other than the originally Ukranian built sister ship to Russia's only carrier they've refitted and gotten into service, they've got a domestically built version of the same design undergoing sea trials and a third domestic design with CATOBAR launching under construction. Some reports say that they've also got two nuclear-powered ones under construction, but I'm not fully convinced of those reports' accuracy.
The point is that China doesn't go around acting like world police because it doesn't want to, but because it can't do it just yet. Give it a decade and you can be sure that they will absolutely be competing with the U.S in doing what the U.S has been doing since WW2.
People shouldn't be all that surprised about it considering how despite outwardly being very high tech, the Japanese can be surprisingly low-tech in many regards.
One good example of this is how email hasn't become as commonplace as it has in most of the developed world. No, people in Japan, particularly companies, instead chose to use fax machines to achieve the same tasks as it was still the 1980s. Another example is that the very old fashioned hierarchies within companies allows bosses to be exactly like this computer illiterate cyber security chief. While this may seem really odd to us westerners, it's perfectly normal over there.
As for how someone so ill fitted for the job has been given said job, it's more to do with how jobs like his are first and foremost given out based on party affiliation rather than aptitude for the job or any kind of merit. It sort of makes you wonder if it was better that rather than having political appointees actually run government organizations like this, limit political appointees within them to oversight roles rather than active management.
I'm not fully convinced that's because of the taxes they actually pay and not because the politicians in the Country Club party that pretend to be on their side tell them to.
Considering how we're talking about a method where we release individuals of a particular species with sabotaged genes into the wild so that they then breed with the the wild population and spread these sabotaged genes across the population trough natural procreation I don't think this has much of a risk of jumping across species.
Worst case scenario is that this spreads beyond the intended target population and you end up exterminating additional populations of the same species.
The issue here is not what the local government can pull in terms of taxes, but the effects for the people already living in the area. It's pretty easy to find textbook examples of this going badly wrong as you only need to look at all of the big tech hotspots and areas with a manageable commute to them. Tech workers pay a lot of taxes, but because of the massive increase in housing cost a lot of particularly lower class people have had no choice but to leave the area they grew up in.
This is also neglecting the issue that workers may end up commuting from outside of the area that's giving them the tax break Boise-style to save money or be able to buy a bigger house, meaning that they obviously don't get any additional tax revenue from these people. In this case all they're getting from the deal is more wear and tear on their infrastructure.
Smart or dumb depends on what they're trying to achieve while holding public office. If the goal is for the benefit of the people living there then they're obviously morons, but it's pretty clear that like most U.S politicians the goal is self-enrichment in which case they're doing a very good job at it and can't really be called morons.
The way I see things it's more like: "Most Americans either want either better benefits or lower taxes, but neither wants to actually pay for it". Those wanting more benefits, primarily poor people, want it paid by increasing taxes on particularly the rich and the people who want lower taxes, primarily rich people, want it paid by cutting benefits.
As much as people in the U.S don't want to talk about class struggles, the reality is that much of U.S politics is pretty much exactly that. The main thing that limit's the extent to which it is the case one of the parties in the two party duopoly is a Country Club party pure and simple while the other sits somewhere in the middle between a Country Club party and a European-style Socialist party.
That's what I was thinking... Why bother when it's beyond obvious that it's really nothing beyond an opportunity for politicians to do some grandstanding? Because that's what happens whenever the executives of a company in the midst of a scandal is asked to come testify before a panel of politicians.
Alternatively it's do with how Chinese citizens have the Great Firewall of China to contend with. Compared to countries where people don't have something like that to contend with Chinese citizens are obviously going to be more interested in VPNs and other techniques to go around it, hence a lot of Chinese VPN services.
Oh and a population of that exceeds the population of the U.S by over a billion...
In my experience that "valuable thing to share" is all to often related some truly ancient system that should have been put to pasture long ago, but the older worker has decided to keep nursing it along and of course not documenting their myriad of hacks to keep it going. One of the first things I did out of university was documenting something like this after the developer's chain smoking had caught up with them and they'd died to assist in the effort to re-engineer this system using off-the-shelf components rather than the bespoke components they'd insisted on using.
The usual response that I get when I bring up this story is a lot of angry comments from older people about how I supposedly helped replace the system with something worse for the sake of replacing it, but it truly as an out-of-date mess. However the new system I took part in developing, with a team where I was still the youngest and the oldest workers were in their 40s, was well documented from the get-go, way better structured and superior in pretty much every conceivable regard.
Come to think of it... My experience with baby boomers is that they're typically very bad at documenting things. I've worked with people randing from university students to baby boomers and the latter is always the group that I find it hardest to work with due to things like no documentation, badly structured code (read: spagetti code), lacking communication skills and insistence on using deprecated APIs and libaries. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those 20-somethings that can't work with anyone not roughly their age, but for some reason I've found that people get and better at their jobs reaching an apex at some point in their 40s whereafter they start getting worse at all of things I've mentioned and by the time they reach their 60s working with them is an absolutely abysmal experience for the reasons that I mentioned. Writing code that's not meant to be maintained by anyone except you for as long as you can remember how you did it seems to be the norm and not the exception for people in their 60s.
I don't think clickbait and trolling is even twitter's biggest problem. No, the original 140 character limit made having a meaningful conversation so difficult most people weren't even going to bother and even after they increased it to a slightly less meaning-restricting 260 the culture was already set.
As much as Dorsey may talk about how what matters are the meaningful conversations, the reality is that it's always been a narcissistic point scoring game where what really matters is your popularity, which is measured in your follower count. To fix this would require some massive changes that would then in turn alienate most of their users, so fixing it is basically a Catch 22. Do nothing and it continues to be one of the most toxic places on the internet, but fix it and you're going to lose a lot of your users because it's ceased to be the toxic snakepit they enjoyed.
Seems like those figures aren't including convertibles as those have been selling pretty well and have made some major inroads into the laptop market. The drop-off in tablet sales probably has a lot to do with how convertibles offer both the tablet form factor and the utility of a laptop whenever needed.
However the main reason for the continued drop-off in pure tablet sales has probably more to do with how there was a single big surge in interest in 2012-2013 and the people who bought in haven't had any compelling reason to upgrade since then. I bought my first tablet, an original Nexus 7, back in 2012 and when I finally got to replacing it earlier this year I found that the decently priced alternatives weren't that big of an upgrade and the ones that were came with an iPad-like price tag. Ended up getting a leftover stock Nexus 9 for just over 100 euros which should probably serve me for another few years.
Or then Samsung phones are so awful people take risks like that to avoid having to use them...
I suspect most of the people making these prank calls are doing so reflexively because Trump is strong on fighting illegal immigration rather than there being an actual thought process behind it.
It seems like the American left as a whole seems to have fallen into the same, completely counter-productive, reactionary "If you're going to zig, we're going to zag"-mindset that the Republicans fell into when Obama was in office. The fact that the Republicans control both houses and the president's office would suggest that it may work if going by seats gained, but going by actual policy made it obviously didn't work until they got control of it all.
My suspicion is that it's probably not too dissimilar to the Polybius arcade game hoax, where a surprisingly convincing story was created by weaving together from real world events like MK Ultra program, urban legends and mythology that got quite famous in the early 2000s. In this case it's a number of news stories that when combined also make up a pretty convincing story, but most importantly one that is very hard to conclusively disprove.
In other words this story seems to be an amalgamation of the following things:
1. The Snowden leaks showing that the NSA had developed tech and procedures to intercept CISCO network hardware so that they could open up the boxes, install very hard to detect bugs in the firmware and then re-seal the boxes using seals forged by the NSA. It is generally thought that the NSA is probably not the only one that has been doing this.
2. Very severe firmware vulnerabilities found in SuperMicro motherboards around 2015. Not only were these and SuperMicro's inability to fully fix the vulnerabilities well publicized, so was the fact that may companies, Apple included, actually removed these machines from their systems because of the security threat they posed.
3. Simple computers the size of a grain of rice being presented to the world around 2015 and gaining a lot of media attention, even going as far as making the cover of Popular Mechanics. While these systems were really just smart sensors with a heavy level of miniaturization, people have for years been talking about more devious uses for the same technology.
4. Widespread and well documented cases of cyber attack and espionage activities aimed at many American companies and government agencies by both private and national level entities in China. It's less one specific attack and more a barrage of attacks and attempts at them over the last decade or so.
Add all of these up and you probably don't even need any malicious intent to make up a story like this, thou it probably will speed up the process. Conspiracy theorists after all pull together stories way more intricate than this from way less concrete source material so it's not implausible that this is just incompetence rather than malice. However I don't fault anyone for leaning either way as to how this conspiracy theory or game of telephone came to happen.
That's what the people who push them keep insisting, but the reality is that projects tend to deal with the kinds of things that CoCs are supposed to be for just fine without one. However more worryingly CoCs have been used in the past to settle grudges over things well outside of the project, usually disagreements on politically contentious issues.
Ummm.... You people do know that Semiaccurate is a kind of notorious for being run by an insanely zealous AMD fanboy? We're talking about the same person who made some absolutely crazy misreading of a number of documents to arrive at a conclusion that Nvidia's Fermi architecture had sub 5% yields as devices based on that architecture were shipping in good numbers.
A reliable source this is not, particularly when it comes to AMD's or it's direct competitors, so wait for some more trustworthy sources before making your mind up on this subject.
While not everyone who has chosen to die their hair some color straight off a neon sign or fill their face with obnoxious piercings behaves this way, they are surprisingly prevalent among the kinds of people who practically live to stir up completely unnecessary drama.
My personal suspicion is that this comes from the same source, an excessively attention seeking personality that doesn't really care about the effects of that behavior on others around them. To them it doesn't matter that they're wasting everyone's time with petty bickering, instead what matters is that they get to be at the center of attention.
I'm personally starting to wonder if the solution to this is to conduct open source development using unique project-specific pseudonyms where nobody knows who anybody else is or anything about them and thus any controversy is severely limited. In a system all that matters is the quality of your work and if you're just going to try to stir up unnecessary arguments and infighting the threshold to kick you out of the project is going to be very low.
Sounds to me like Google really didn't like the EU hampering their vertical integration plans and are retaliating by raising the costs of smartphones to people living in the EU area. Then again if you are a company with a motto as benign as "Don't be evil" only to get rid of it then retaliation is probably going to be your standard response to consumer protection laws being enforced.
The specific number seems to be based on the idea that they're going to be losing all revenue from advertising and datamining operations and are simply pulling in that revenue directly from users as a single up-front payment. For comparison's sake Facebook's per-user revenues were about $20 in 2017 so that's probably two year's revenue from datamining and in-app advertising trough Google APIs.
The fact that Apple only has 15% of the market while Google basically owns the rest of it? Because the specific charge the EU is levelling against Google is abuse of dominant market position and this is how they define it:
http://ec.europa.eu/competitio...
I always assumed that the idea was to sell the brand names to someone who would then license that brand name to companies like those operating the Toys 'R Us stores in Europe. Actual stores and inventory that hasn't already been liquidated is obviously going to be auctioned off as planned and thus the only change to the plan is that it's the creditors themselves, or more specifically a company set up by them for this purpose, who are going to be licensing out the name rather than somebody else.
If this goes trough some old stores will probably re-open, but they'll be under new ownership and just licensing the brand rather than actual Toys 'R Us stores and may incorporate some major changes in concept. However more probably than not most of the stores will just be generic toy stores with a new brand to draw in customers.