It sounds to me like they ran over a guy, and somebody's trying to dodge a lawsuit by saying someone "threw themselves at the car". And if there was, as the self-driving car's driver says, "damage to a tail light", let me ask you this: If you went outside and threw your body at a car, do you think you could break a tail light?
If you take a moment or two to review some of the "insurance scam" videos on YouTube, you will see several examples of people who throw themselves at vehicles hard enough to break the windshield - one with a foot, another with their head. I don't see how a taillight would present much of a problem either. Don't underestimate crazy/desperate.
I know people who failed to treat the government as an adversary, who were asked by the police to come in and talk to them, and who did so because they had "nothing to hide" and wanted to cooperate. They ended up in jail for the weekend (with no evidence to hold them but the police knew they couldn't get out until a court hearing on Monday and wanted to "soften them up" and try to wring a confession out of them) and although they ultimately prevailed in the legal battle, they lost their college degree (college dumped them during the spring semester of their senior year after they were charged but without any conviction [or evidence beyond a psychological profile]) and several years of their life.
Don't t think for a minute that any agent of a government has your best interests at heart. I believe that you should be honest and ethical in your dealings with your government, but not non-adversarial. Avail yourself of any/all legal protections while complying as much as is required with legal orders (and just understanding what orders are legal can present a challenge, because government agents are not above issuing non-legal orders that they hope you don't realize aren't legal; they (in some cases) aren't even legally required not to lie to you, nevermind how they are allowed to strongly imply or mislead by omission).
I'm speaking in general here... obviously there are bad actors, both individuals and corporations, and I don't want to see those bad actors get away with illegal actions. I believe that people and corporations should follow the law, even if they disagree with those laws. But there is a big difference between acting illegally, and merely maintaining an adversarial stance when dealing with someone/something.
I don't know about your government, but the U.S. government was initially established with the expectation of an adversarial relationship between the government and the governed. The government was granted an enumerated list of limited powers, and (before too long) the constitution was amended with an explicit set of rights (the so-called "bill of rights") that although not intended to be a complete list of rights held by the people and the states apart from the federal government, captured a number of expected government overreaches and labeled them "off limits" right up front. The folks involved in setting up the U.S. federal government were deeply suspicious of government power at the same time that they knew a government was necessary.
I think that prior to some relatively recent consumer-level products, most of the information security technology available to non-government consumers was of the easily breakable variety. For example, I bought a Motorola cordless phone that purported to be "secure" so that my neighbors couldn't listen to my phone calls - then I listened to it on my scanner, and found that it mere inverted the audio signal, which could either be easily inverted back, or (with some practice) you could actually learn to listen and decode yourself. Until the advent of Windows XP and MacOS X, most consumer computers had either no real username/password protection, or easily breakable username/password protection. Even after consumer computers had username/password protection, physical access to the console trumped all protections. Alternatively, one could just remove the hard drive and analyze it in a different computer.
The government had access to some technology that produced better results... STU III telephones prevented eavesdropping or line-tapping from yielding much intelligence. Locking computers up in secure facilities with no external access and TEMPEST emissions protections kept information from disclosure. But these things are all very expensive and something that only governments can afford.
In the 2000s and 2010s this changed... full hardwire encryption is available on consumer devices. Mobile phones have secure enclaves and tamper-proof hardware that forms the foundation for some decent lockdown capabilities (that can be diminished for usability purposes). For those who desire it, an end-to end encrypted voice communication system can be had for not too much money.
In the past, I think law enforcement took about as much notice of consumer-level security as a good burglar does of the average lock on a front door (even if its a deadbolt) - i.e., none. It could all be easily defeated/circumvented. Now consumer-level security is starting to provide a real challenge to law enforcement, and they are taking notice. Having failed an early attempt to seize the high ground (the Clipper Chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip), and now that usability has moved passed the PGP stage, the law enforcement community is seeing a future reality that they don't like much.
The Fourth Amendment explicitly allows the Executive Branch â" after securiing Judicial Branch's approval â" to access all of our possessions and "effects". They have a right to do that, which no one seems to seriously dispute.
The strong encryption has given us the means to lock things up so that even the government can't get them â" this part is new. Although they still have the right to read your data, they no longer have the ability to do it.
I'm not of the opinion that the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment explicitly allows the Executive Branch to access all of a citizen's possessions and "effects", nor does that confer upon them a "right" to do so. It establishes that no search can take place or things be seized without a warrant that specifies what is to be searched/what is to be seized, nothing more. I supposed there is an implicit assumption there that if they find what they are searching for they can seize it, and use it as evidence, but that is a far cry from a right "to access all possessions and "effects."" For example, if they don't know where to look for something (or even whether it exists) because it has been hidden it/all knowledge of it has been hidden, they obviously can't search/seize it. Strong encryption can be viewed as giving one the ability to hide data so that it can't be seen rather than the ability to lock it up so that it can't be accessed.
So I don't agree that the police have the well-established or generally accepted power to search all of a citizen's stuff; just that which they can find. And encryption lets one hide it well.
I strongly agree with the "watch out for your own best interest" advice. Your employer is most certainly doing the same. If you have the opportunity to provide advance notice of an impending "major life change" in your life without adversely impacting yourself, have fun. Otherwise.... look out for number one.
I think you are conflating two different things that has led to a poor comparison between two entirely different system environments. Baseband versus broadband are signaling techniques, not measurements of speed. The speed of a digital communications medium can be measured in bits per second, so you could have a 10 Mbps baseband signaling system (such as 10BASE5, the broadly implemented DIX then IEEE Ethernet LAN specification from the late 1980s), or you can have a 100 Mbps baseband signaling system (such as 100BASE-TX, the IEEE Ethernet LAN specification from the mid 1990s).
The term "broadband" technically means the use of multiple passband channels that can be aggregated together to achieve a greater overall communications rate than any single passband channel. It came to be used as a non-technical marketing term for "fast Internet" at some point, but hopefully the typical/. participant will understand that it is not a technical term when used in that way.
The 1980s 10 Mbps Ethernet standard operated over a maximum distance of 1.5 kilometers (3 segments of 500 meters each, connected via repeaters to form a single 1.5 kilometer collision domain network) in a shared bus topology. Longer distances could be achieved only by using bridges to separate collision domains (the distance limitation for a collision domain is based on the minimum frame size and the time needed to detect a collision between stations at opposite ends of the network). When used in this way, networks could cover a larger geographical area (several kilometers to hundreds of kilometers) but with severe limitations on throughput through the backbone (which was limited to just 10 Mbps).
To suggest that the deployment of a nationwide Internet service that provides a minimum of 10 Mbps to every station is in any way only equivalent to 10BASE5, or even the 1990s 100BASE-TX Local Area Network standards, demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the history of data communications technology and the difference between LANs (Local Area Networks) and WANs (Wide Area Networks).
I think you hit the nail on the head, at least from my point of view. There is a difference between "health care," and health insurance. I want health insurance to be there to cover me when a significant unplanned expense pops up, like a broken arm, leg, surgery, etc. A "catastrophic plan" meets that need quite well.
I want health care, too, but I don't expect that I can get more out of it than I put into it. In other words, if I'm going to go to the Dr. once a year for a well visit, and I'm going to get birth control, then I expect that my health care payments are going to add up to roughly the cost of my yearly Dr. visit and my birth control bill. And I'm ok with that, as long as I don't get taken to the cleaners to pay for a doctor visit or birth control.
When these two things get conflated, we have people who want to pay less $$ in a year than the cost of the ordinary care they are receiving, and then want the cost of the health insurance for "free". This is not a tenable situation.
From my point of view, "affordable care" meant health care that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, not expensive health insurance with the government picking up the part of the tab that I couldn't pay (thereby eroding market pressure on the actual prices). There are things that I think the government could have done (but didn't) to address the affordability issue directly. For example, if someone is not part of a collective group, they pay "rack rates" to a medical service professional; these "rack rates" greatly exceed what anyone with a plan is paying. Perhaps the government could negotiate so that everyone not on a specific plan was part of the government's "group" and got a rate similar to what people other plans received. After addressing these affordability issues, then the government can see what needs to be done about a) helping people afford health care when they can't do it on their own, and then b) helping those who can't afford health insurance as well.
As long as we continue to mix together "health care" and "health insurance", and as long as we continue to think that "affordable" just means helping people pay no matter what the cost, we as a nation will continue to have problems with the "affordability" of "health care".
A website that provides public information (no login) could use a rate limit to control how much of its resources can be commandeered by a third party. A website that provides information only after a login (and has terms of service for same) can revoke the login privileges if the terms of service are violated. Neither case seems to warrant aligning violation of terms of service or slurping too much data with committing a felony hack, just as trying to take too many brochures from the distribution rack doesn't warrant a felony theft charge.
Alternatively, you could just wait a bit, and there will be posts on fan sites and eventually Wikipedia that explore all the nuances of the plot twists. You read those, and you are up to date. It's a more efficient use of your time and economic resources.
Exactly - don't load remote content automatically. And when you get an e-mail that is essentially blank because its all remote code/images, you just delete it. All of the "campaign" e-mail sites (e.g. MailChimp) that I am familiar with automatically embed tracking in the messages that they send, so I'm not surprised at the amount of tracking going on. Whether or not that tracking is a prime requirement of the sender (or even actually monitored), or just came along with the mailing function, is not clear in all cases.
You noticed that too? The article talks about the stated rationale for certain policy decisions in the UK after WW II, then fast forwards to the present state of gender (sex?) imbalance in "tech" in the US, and then implies that the gross unfairness of the former is the reason for the latter. Perhaps, perhaps not. A little more data on both would be nice, and not conflating countries and cultures without demonstrating the connection.
Since my "fitness" to comment might be questioned... I'm a middle-aged white male with a "lower class" blue collar background who attended a vocational high school and learned "data processing" (along with a fair number of females in my shop) but was not adequately prepared for college. I then went to college anyway but was not accepted into the computer science major (because I lacked the "right" mathematics background) but took computer science courses behind my advisor's back. Eventually I was admitted to the major and received a degree (magna cum laude) because I had met all the requirements (and then some). I later met and married a woman who struggled through EE classes in college then switched to CompSci where she was also challenged, but not as much in EE. She eventually graduated and got a job programming at a major defense contractor right out of college, where she was implementing neural network routines on custom hardware boards for IBM "PC compatibles" in the 1990s. I was neither catered to, nor was she denied opportunities while we pursued our education. We both met obstacles and overcame them. My post-Bachelors salary curve rose somewhat more quickly than hers, but I had 10 years work experience in the field (thanks to my vocational high school training) by the time I graduated and so landed a higher paying job out of college. We both peaked salary wise at the same approximately level.
The plural of anecdote isn't data, but I haven't been overwhelmed by evidence in favor of a deliberate redirection of females away from CompSci/IT. I don't consider a lack of encouragement the same thing, and lord knows I was not encouraged but managed to get what I wanted in the end anyway. This career field isn't for everyone. Me and my classmates had to put up with a lot of ribbing from other high school students about how all we did was "push buttons." Our comeback was that we may be just "pushing buttons," but we knew the right buttons to push. All of this took place long before it was popular to be a "nerd." We did what we did because we liked it, and we saw some possible opportunity down the road (and for me, working in an air conditioned office seemed better than driving a fuel oil delivery truck with my dad).
Your model doesn't recognize the effects of supply and demand. Those who are in more demand for sexual favors will command higher prices than those who are in lower demand. I think if that is factored in, we will still have "haves" and "have nots," but the distribution of wealth will be based on sexual desirability.
Except for those who inherit or are handed wealth by others, we all have to start someplace, and it may be with just $50. If $50 is all you ever have to invest, you aren't going to get very far. Passive investing works best when you have a steady amount of $$ to invest, and you can use "dollar cost averaging" to take the ups and downs out of the market. $50/week will go far.
The person with $100k to invest in stocks probably started with less, and learned along the way, and so will do dramatically better (even in a relative/proportional sense) than the person with $50 who is (probably) just starting out. I don't think much of investment consultants, and I haven't made a habit of consulting them, so I wouldn't attribute the success of the $100k investor to them. My best "advisor" was this book: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Investment-Guide-Youll-Ever/dp/0544781937/ref=dp_ob_title_bk, but you might have to gain some experience to believe what you read.
The worst mistakes I've seen people make are to time the market, to pull their $$ out AFTER a big stomach-clenching drop (because they are afraid of a further drop), to get greedy with exotic strategies ("let's trade options, shall we?"), and to sit out the market waiting for prices to drop so that they can "buy low" and "sell high." Oh, and to pull their money out of a 401(k)/IRA/investment plan because of an "emergency." (If it is your money or your life [or the life of someone you care about] then its an emergency. Otherwise, leave the $$ in the market.) Pick sane investments (index mutual funds have done me well), know your investment time horizon, and stick to your plans.
I interpret the advice from Mr. O'Leary as suggesting that you avoid unnecessary expense, spending your money where it will bring what you regard as true value. His advice on buying coffee wouldn't help me; I don't drink coffee. However, I did have a bad "eat lunch out" habit that boosted my investments once I kicked it. I also learned to subscribe to the magazines I liked instead of buying them at the newsstand (and reading them at the library is even cheaper and avoids a lot of waste). I also stopped reading the advertisement supplements in the Sunday paper... turns out you "need" a lot less when you don't think about it in the first place. (Adjust as necessary for however you imbibe your daily quota of advertising today.) Spend time hanging out with/interacting with friends; keep busy by volunteering to help others and doing something you find rewarding; discover activities and pursuits you enjoy that don't require a constant stream of $$ out of your pocket. In the end you will spend less, save more, and find you will probably need less later so that what you have saved will last longer.
Leading to power companies paying bonuses to people to install devices in their homes that permit the power utility to turn off/on certain appliances (air conditioning, water heaters, and the line) to mediate demand under peak loading conditions.
I'm not arguing against you; just pointing out two aspects of your statement that might benefit from clarification:
1. The "early" Internet (a problematic term, I admit) did not have "net neutrality" in a pure sense; it did not allow commercial use. So while it is true that at that point no commercial interests were acting as gatekeepers/toll booths, this was trivially true because there were no commercial interests on the network. I suspect that there may have been debate amongst early Internet pioneers about what kinds of policies might become necessary for controlling/prioritizing traffic; I don't know whether they foresaw just how significant the Internet would become or how commercial interests would seek to monetize it. (For the record, I'm in favor of the US classifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II.)
2. The U.S. policies such as whether US ISPs are regulated as "common carriers" under US law/regulations may have some related affects on the global Internet, but these policies only affect ISP operations in the U.S., not all Internet service providers globally. Other countries are free to choose how they regulate data traffic within their borders, including traffic on the "Internet." So it may be an overstatement to claim that the US is on a path towards "Internet destruction" by a change in regulation that applies to US ISPs only.
There are (at least in history) operating systems that use the source of a login to determine whether the login is allowed. Some of these can be configured to block root logins from any source other than the local console. I'm not directly familiar with how MacOS "screen sharing" is tied into the OS (i.e., did a login coming through the "screen sharing" mechanism show a different login source that was used to limit certain behaviors), so it was worth it (to me) to validate that the technique worked via "screen sharing" rather than just assume it did (and have someone else point out my stupidity later). Words to live by: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Unhappily, and perhaps/hopefully entirely coincidentally, the Open Directory database on my MacOS server got borked during my testing, and had to be manually recovered to restore the network accounts on my machine. I'm wary, because this is the first time in 3 years that this Open Directory database has failed on me, but I really don't want to spend hours determining whether their is a relationship if i don't have to. Please Apple, deliver an OS patch today. This low-level stuff is supposed to "just work" so that I can spend time dealing with "higher level" problems.
I followed up with a remote test, and the attack works fine over "Screen Sharing" (VNC) to my iMac 27" from circa 2013 that I also just upgraded to High Sierra (10.13.1) over Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas.
Needless to say, I now have a root password set on my Mac-in-trashes. I didn't before because the root account isn't normally enabled and I was not being sufficiently paranoid; sigh.
I have a MacBook Pro that I upgraded to High Sierra (10.13.1) over Thanksgiving. My login screen is set to only offer the pre-defined user accounts. I logged into a non-privileged account that I keep around for testing purposes. Went to the top-level of the file system; did a "Get Info" on a folder I didn't have access to; asked it to show me "Sharing and Permissions"; clicked the lock icon to unlock them; got a username/password dialog box; entered "root" as the username with a blank password once; the dialog box shook and cleared; entered "root" with a blank password again, and the action completed with the lock unlocked. Now when I go to the login screen, I have an "Other" account showing; if I click "Other" I get a username and password dialog box; if I enter "root" as the username with a blank password Bob's your uncle. Logs right in, shows the username in the upper left of the screen as "System Administrator." The account has root access to the machine.
This is probably exercisable remotely if remote logins are enabled (screen sharing, anyway); I don't think anything I did would not be doable through a remote login (but I have not the means to test at the moment). Seems like there might be some blood on the floor over this one, at least at some organizations. I don't envy sys admins in large academic environments either.
If the Clinton Foundation isn't a corporation, just what kind of legal entity is it? The dictionary definition of a "corporation" is a company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law.
synonyms: company, firm, business, concern, operation, house, organization, agency, trust, partnership;
The Clinton Foundation is a group of people authorized to act as a single entity.
Fortunately the clouds and rain in Washington (state of) cause some significant percentage of the ex-Californians to run away again, otherwise the Seattle political culture would be oozing even faster over the rest of the state.
The Internet significantly increased the efficiency and effectiveness of communications. Unfortunately, this includes "evil" as well as "good" communications. The world productivity jumps of the 1990s and 2000s were substantially assisted by Internet communications and IT in general. Unfortunately, the bad guys benefit along with the good guys.
Slashdot Mirror
If you take a moment or two to review some of the "insurance scam" videos on YouTube, you will see several examples of people who throw themselves at vehicles hard enough to break the windshield - one with a foot, another with their head. I don't see how a taillight would present much of a problem either. Don't underestimate crazy/desperate.
I know people who failed to treat the government as an adversary, who were asked by the police to come in and talk to them, and who did so because they had "nothing to hide" and wanted to cooperate. They ended up in jail for the weekend (with no evidence to hold them but the police knew they couldn't get out until a court hearing on Monday and wanted to "soften them up" and try to wring a confession out of them) and although they ultimately prevailed in the legal battle, they lost their college degree (college dumped them during the spring semester of their senior year after they were charged but without any conviction [or evidence beyond a psychological profile]) and several years of their life.
Don't t think for a minute that any agent of a government has your best interests at heart. I believe that you should be honest and ethical in your dealings with your government, but not non-adversarial. Avail yourself of any/all legal protections while complying as much as is required with legal orders (and just understanding what orders are legal can present a challenge, because government agents are not above issuing non-legal orders that they hope you don't realize aren't legal; they (in some cases) aren't even legally required not to lie to you, nevermind how they are allowed to strongly imply or mislead by omission).
I'm speaking in general here... obviously there are bad actors, both individuals and corporations, and I don't want to see those bad actors get away with illegal actions. I believe that people and corporations should follow the law, even if they disagree with those laws. But there is a big difference between acting illegally, and merely maintaining an adversarial stance when dealing with someone/something.
I don't know about your government, but the U.S. government was initially established with the expectation of an adversarial relationship between the government and the governed. The government was granted an enumerated list of limited powers, and (before too long) the constitution was amended with an explicit set of rights (the so-called "bill of rights") that although not intended to be a complete list of rights held by the people and the states apart from the federal government, captured a number of expected government overreaches and labeled them "off limits" right up front. The folks involved in setting up the U.S. federal government were deeply suspicious of government power at the same time that they knew a government was necessary.
I think that prior to some relatively recent consumer-level products, most of the information security technology available to non-government consumers was of the easily breakable variety. For example, I bought a Motorola cordless phone that purported to be "secure" so that my neighbors couldn't listen to my phone calls - then I listened to it on my scanner, and found that it mere inverted the audio signal, which could either be easily inverted back, or (with some practice) you could actually learn to listen and decode yourself. Until the advent of Windows XP and MacOS X, most consumer computers had either no real username/password protection, or easily breakable username/password protection. Even after consumer computers had username/password protection, physical access to the console trumped all protections. Alternatively, one could just remove the hard drive and analyze it in a different computer.
The government had access to some technology that produced better results... STU III telephones prevented eavesdropping or line-tapping from yielding much intelligence. Locking computers up in secure facilities with no external access and TEMPEST emissions protections kept information from disclosure. But these things are all very expensive and something that only governments can afford.
In the 2000s and 2010s this changed... full hardwire encryption is available on consumer devices. Mobile phones have secure enclaves and tamper-proof hardware that forms the foundation for some decent lockdown capabilities (that can be diminished for usability purposes). For those who desire it, an end-to end encrypted voice communication system can be had for not too much money.
In the past, I think law enforcement took about as much notice of consumer-level security as a good burglar does of the average lock on a front door (even if its a deadbolt) - i.e., none. It could all be easily defeated/circumvented. Now consumer-level security is starting to provide a real challenge to law enforcement, and they are taking notice. Having failed an early attempt to seize the high ground (the Clipper Chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip), and now that usability has moved passed the PGP stage, the law enforcement community is seeing a future reality that they don't like much.
I'm not of the opinion that the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment explicitly allows the Executive Branch to access all of a citizen's possessions and "effects", nor does that confer upon them a "right" to do so. It establishes that no search can take place or things be seized without a warrant that specifies what is to be searched/what is to be seized, nothing more. I supposed there is an implicit assumption there that if they find what they are searching for they can seize it, and use it as evidence, but that is a far cry from a right "to access all possessions and "effects."" For example, if they don't know where to look for something (or even whether it exists) because it has been hidden it/all knowledge of it has been hidden, they obviously can't search/seize it. Strong encryption can be viewed as giving one the ability to hide data so that it can't be seen rather than the ability to lock it up so that it can't be accessed.
So I don't agree that the police have the well-established or generally accepted power to search all of a citizen's stuff; just that which they can find. And encryption lets one hide it well.
I strongly agree with the "watch out for your own best interest" advice. Your employer is most certainly doing the same. If you have the opportunity to provide advance notice of an impending "major life change" in your life without adversely impacting yourself, have fun. Otherwise.... look out for number one.
I think you are conflating two different things that has led to a poor comparison between two entirely different system environments. Baseband versus broadband are signaling techniques, not measurements of speed. The speed of a digital communications medium can be measured in bits per second, so you could have a 10 Mbps baseband signaling system (such as 10BASE5, the broadly implemented DIX then IEEE Ethernet LAN specification from the late 1980s), or you can have a 100 Mbps baseband signaling system (such as 100BASE-TX, the IEEE Ethernet LAN specification from the mid 1990s).
The term "broadband" technically means the use of multiple passband channels that can be aggregated together to achieve a greater overall communications rate than any single passband channel. It came to be used as a non-technical marketing term for "fast Internet" at some point, but hopefully the typical /. participant will understand that it is not a technical term when used in that way.
The 1980s 10 Mbps Ethernet standard operated over a maximum distance of 1.5 kilometers (3 segments of 500 meters each, connected via repeaters to form a single 1.5 kilometer collision domain network) in a shared bus topology. Longer distances could be achieved only by using bridges to separate collision domains (the distance limitation for a collision domain is based on the minimum frame size and the time needed to detect a collision between stations at opposite ends of the network). When used in this way, networks could cover a larger geographical area (several kilometers to hundreds of kilometers) but with severe limitations on throughput through the backbone (which was limited to just 10 Mbps).
To suggest that the deployment of a nationwide Internet service that provides a minimum of 10 Mbps to every station is in any way only equivalent to 10BASE5, or even the 1990s 100BASE-TX Local Area Network standards, demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the history of data communications technology and the difference between LANs (Local Area Networks) and WANs (Wide Area Networks).
I think you hit the nail on the head, at least from my point of view. There is a difference between "health care," and health insurance. I want health insurance to be there to cover me when a significant unplanned expense pops up, like a broken arm, leg, surgery, etc. A "catastrophic plan" meets that need quite well.
I want health care, too, but I don't expect that I can get more out of it than I put into it. In other words, if I'm going to go to the Dr. once a year for a well visit, and I'm going to get birth control, then I expect that my health care payments are going to add up to roughly the cost of my yearly Dr. visit and my birth control bill. And I'm ok with that, as long as I don't get taken to the cleaners to pay for a doctor visit or birth control.
When these two things get conflated, we have people who want to pay less $$ in a year than the cost of the ordinary care they are receiving, and then want the cost of the health insurance for "free". This is not a tenable situation.
From my point of view, "affordable care" meant health care that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, not expensive health insurance with the government picking up the part of the tab that I couldn't pay (thereby eroding market pressure on the actual prices). There are things that I think the government could have done (but didn't) to address the affordability issue directly. For example, if someone is not part of a collective group, they pay "rack rates" to a medical service professional; these "rack rates" greatly exceed what anyone with a plan is paying. Perhaps the government could negotiate so that everyone not on a specific plan was part of the government's "group" and got a rate similar to what people other plans received. After addressing these affordability issues, then the government can see what needs to be done about a) helping people afford health care when they can't do it on their own, and then b) helping those who can't afford health insurance as well.
As long as we continue to mix together "health care" and "health insurance", and as long as we continue to think that "affordable" just means helping people pay no matter what the cost, we as a nation will continue to have problems with the "affordability" of "health care".
A website that provides public information (no login) could use a rate limit to control how much of its resources can be commandeered by a third party. A website that provides information only after a login (and has terms of service for same) can revoke the login privileges if the terms of service are violated. Neither case seems to warrant aligning violation of terms of service or slurping too much data with committing a felony hack, just as trying to take too many brochures from the distribution rack doesn't warrant a felony theft charge.
Alternatively, you could just wait a bit, and there will be posts on fan sites and eventually Wikipedia that explore all the nuances of the plot twists. You read those, and you are up to date. It's a more efficient use of your time and economic resources.
I'm not sure anyone using "gmail" as their primary e-mail service is very worried about "tracking."
Exactly - don't load remote content automatically. And when you get an e-mail that is essentially blank because its all remote code/images, you just delete it. All of the "campaign" e-mail sites (e.g. MailChimp) that I am familiar with automatically embed tracking in the messages that they send, so I'm not surprised at the amount of tracking going on. Whether or not that tracking is a prime requirement of the sender (or even actually monitored), or just came along with the mailing function, is not clear in all cases.
You noticed that too? The article talks about the stated rationale for certain policy decisions in the UK after WW II, then fast forwards to the present state of gender (sex?) imbalance in "tech" in the US, and then implies that the gross unfairness of the former is the reason for the latter. Perhaps, perhaps not. A little more data on both would be nice, and not conflating countries and cultures without demonstrating the connection.
Since my "fitness" to comment might be questioned... I'm a middle-aged white male with a "lower class" blue collar background who attended a vocational high school and learned "data processing" (along with a fair number of females in my shop) but was not adequately prepared for college. I then went to college anyway but was not accepted into the computer science major (because I lacked the "right" mathematics background) but took computer science courses behind my advisor's back. Eventually I was admitted to the major and received a degree (magna cum laude) because I had met all the requirements (and then some). I later met and married a woman who struggled through EE classes in college then switched to CompSci where she was also challenged, but not as much in EE. She eventually graduated and got a job programming at a major defense contractor right out of college, where she was implementing neural network routines on custom hardware boards for IBM "PC compatibles" in the 1990s. I was neither catered to, nor was she denied opportunities while we pursued our education. We both met obstacles and overcame them. My post-Bachelors salary curve rose somewhat more quickly than hers, but I had 10 years work experience in the field (thanks to my vocational high school training) by the time I graduated and so landed a higher paying job out of college. We both peaked salary wise at the same approximately level.
The plural of anecdote isn't data, but I haven't been overwhelmed by evidence in favor of a deliberate redirection of females away from CompSci/IT. I don't consider a lack of encouragement the same thing, and lord knows I was not encouraged but managed to get what I wanted in the end anyway. This career field isn't for everyone. Me and my classmates had to put up with a lot of ribbing from other high school students about how all we did was "push buttons." Our comeback was that we may be just "pushing buttons," but we knew the right buttons to push. All of this took place long before it was popular to be a "nerd." We did what we did because we liked it, and we saw some possible opportunity down the road (and for me, working in an air conditioned office seemed better than driving a fuel oil delivery truck with my dad).
Your model doesn't recognize the effects of supply and demand. Those who are in more demand for sexual favors will command higher prices than those who are in lower demand. I think if that is factored in, we will still have "haves" and "have nots," but the distribution of wealth will be based on sexual desirability.
Except for those who inherit or are handed wealth by others, we all have to start someplace, and it may be with just $50. If $50 is all you ever have to invest, you aren't going to get very far. Passive investing works best when you have a steady amount of $$ to invest, and you can use "dollar cost averaging" to take the ups and downs out of the market. $50/week will go far.
The person with $100k to invest in stocks probably started with less, and learned along the way, and so will do dramatically better (even in a relative/proportional sense) than the person with $50 who is (probably) just starting out. I don't think much of investment consultants, and I haven't made a habit of consulting them, so I wouldn't attribute the success of the $100k investor to them. My best "advisor" was this book: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Investment-Guide-Youll-Ever/dp/0544781937/ref=dp_ob_title_bk, but you might have to gain some experience to believe what you read.
The worst mistakes I've seen people make are to time the market, to pull their $$ out AFTER a big stomach-clenching drop (because they are afraid of a further drop), to get greedy with exotic strategies ("let's trade options, shall we?"), and to sit out the market waiting for prices to drop so that they can "buy low" and "sell high." Oh, and to pull their money out of a 401(k)/IRA/investment plan because of an "emergency." (If it is your money or your life [or the life of someone you care about] then its an emergency. Otherwise, leave the $$ in the market.) Pick sane investments (index mutual funds have done me well), know your investment time horizon, and stick to your plans.
I interpret the advice from Mr. O'Leary as suggesting that you avoid unnecessary expense, spending your money where it will bring what you regard as true value. His advice on buying coffee wouldn't help me; I don't drink coffee. However, I did have a bad "eat lunch out" habit that boosted my investments once I kicked it. I also learned to subscribe to the magazines I liked instead of buying them at the newsstand (and reading them at the library is even cheaper and avoids a lot of waste). I also stopped reading the advertisement supplements in the Sunday paper... turns out you "need" a lot less when you don't think about it in the first place. (Adjust as necessary for however you imbibe your daily quota of advertising today.) Spend time hanging out with/interacting with friends; keep busy by volunteering to help others and doing something you find rewarding; discover activities and pursuits you enjoy that don't require a constant stream of $$ out of your pocket. In the end you will spend less, save more, and find you will probably need less later so that what you have saved will last longer.
Some thoughts:
https://torah.org/learning/pirkei-avos-chapter4-1b/
http://time.com/money/collection-post/4034098/get-rich-secret/
Leading to power companies paying bonuses to people to install devices in their homes that permit the power utility to turn off/on certain appliances (air conditioning, water heaters, and the line) to mediate demand under peak loading conditions.
I'm not arguing against you; just pointing out two aspects of your statement that might benefit from clarification:
1. The "early" Internet (a problematic term, I admit) did not have "net neutrality" in a pure sense; it did not allow commercial use. So while it is true that at that point no commercial interests were acting as gatekeepers/toll booths, this was trivially true because there were no commercial interests on the network. I suspect that there may have been debate amongst early Internet pioneers about what kinds of policies might become necessary for controlling/prioritizing traffic; I don't know whether they foresaw just how significant the Internet would become or how commercial interests would seek to monetize it. (For the record, I'm in favor of the US classifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II.)
2. The U.S. policies such as whether US ISPs are regulated as "common carriers" under US law/regulations may have some related affects on the global Internet, but these policies only affect ISP operations in the U.S., not all Internet service providers globally. Other countries are free to choose how they regulate data traffic within their borders, including traffic on the "Internet." So it may be an overstatement to claim that the US is on a path towards "Internet destruction" by a change in regulation that applies to US ISPs only.
There are (at least in history) operating systems that use the source of a login to determine whether the login is allowed. Some of these can be configured to block root logins from any source other than the local console. I'm not directly familiar with how MacOS "screen sharing" is tied into the OS (i.e., did a login coming through the "screen sharing" mechanism show a different login source that was used to limit certain behaviors), so it was worth it (to me) to validate that the technique worked via "screen sharing" rather than just assume it did (and have someone else point out my stupidity later). Words to live by: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Unhappily, and perhaps/hopefully entirely coincidentally, the Open Directory database on my MacOS server got borked during my testing, and had to be manually recovered to restore the network accounts on my machine. I'm wary, because this is the first time in 3 years that this Open Directory database has failed on me, but I really don't want to spend hours determining whether their is a relationship if i don't have to. Please Apple, deliver an OS patch today. This low-level stuff is supposed to "just work" so that I can spend time dealing with "higher level" problems.
I followed up with a remote test, and the attack works fine over "Screen Sharing" (VNC) to my iMac 27" from circa 2013 that I also just upgraded to High Sierra (10.13.1) over Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas.
Needless to say, I now have a root password set on my Mac-in-trashes. I didn't before because the root account isn't normally enabled and I was not being sufficiently paranoid; sigh.
I just reproduced it.
I have a MacBook Pro that I upgraded to High Sierra (10.13.1) over Thanksgiving. My login screen is set to only offer the pre-defined user accounts. I logged into a non-privileged account that I keep around for testing purposes. Went to the top-level of the file system; did a "Get Info" on a folder I didn't have access to; asked it to show me "Sharing and Permissions"; clicked the lock icon to unlock them; got a username/password dialog box; entered "root" as the username with a blank password once; the dialog box shook and cleared; entered "root" with a blank password again, and the action completed with the lock unlocked. Now when I go to the login screen, I have an "Other" account showing; if I click "Other" I get a username and password dialog box; if I enter "root" as the username with a blank password Bob's your uncle. Logs right in, shows the username in the upper left of the screen as "System Administrator." The account has root access to the machine.
This is probably exercisable remotely if remote logins are enabled (screen sharing, anyway); I don't think anything I did would not be doable through a remote login (but I have not the means to test at the moment). Seems like there might be some blood on the floor over this one, at least at some organizations. I don't envy sys admins in large academic environments either.
If the Clinton Foundation isn't a corporation, just what kind of legal entity is it? The dictionary definition of a "corporation" is a company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law. synonyms: company, firm, business, concern, operation, house, organization, agency, trust, partnership;
The Clinton Foundation is a group of people authorized to act as a single entity.
A hacker convention is a professional environment? What has happened to the world?
Living at the YMCA is coming back into vogue? How wonderful!
Fortunately the clouds and rain in Washington (state of) cause some significant percentage of the ex-Californians to run away again, otherwise the Seattle political culture would be oozing even faster over the rest of the state.
The Internet significantly increased the efficiency and effectiveness of communications. Unfortunately, this includes "evil" as well as "good" communications. The world productivity jumps of the 1990s and 2000s were substantially assisted by Internet communications and IT in general. Unfortunately, the bad guys benefit along with the good guys.