getting into Harvard is also almost impossible. maybe we should all just start going illegally.
Do you really want to equate immigrating to the US with attending Harvard? You can't get into Harvard by being born in some particular place; start putting requirements on being in the US and a lot of Americans are going to have to leave.
Before anyone starts ranting that Walmart is not a monopoly, there are two kinds of monopolies. Horizontal where the company controls a particular step of the process across the entire market, and vertical, where the company controls every aspect from beginning to end as much as possible and dictates all aspects of everything that the company deals with.
Poppycock.
The notion of a vertical monopoly does exist, but it's used to describe a monopoly (controller of nearly 100% of a market) that achieved its monopoly status through vertical integration. It is not the case that any vertically-integrated company is a monopoly, even if they have achieved total vertical integration. As long as there is still substantial competition at each level in the supply chain, it isn't a monopoly in any of them. If competition has effectively been eliminated at any level in the supply chain, then the company is a monopoly at that level regardless of how integrated they are at other levels.
Wal-mart might well be a regional monopoly, in the sense that there are regions of the country where they have driven all competing retailers out of business, but they're not a monopoly in general. And it's further possible that they'll eventually leverage vertical integration to become a general monopoly. But they're not now.
Better stock up on all the appliances you're going to need for the rest of your life, then. Because in a few years it's going to be very hard to buy appliances that don't connect.
He's probably right about the push towards having to be online, but I fail to see how an IoT firewall should mitigate it.
+1.
Firewalls were never more than a half-baked stopgap anyway, intended to band-aid over the problem that system design and implementation sucked (anti-virus is the same thing, but much, much worse -- we're getting that right with the mobile iteration, at least).
The right answer is not to employ firewalls to block access to ports that shouldn't be open... the ports just shouldn't be open. Devices should only respond to packets they're supposed to respond to, and should encrypt and authenticate the connections they are supposed to allow (which a firewall really couldn't do) using standard protocols implemented in common and well-scrutinized libraries, and should blackhole everything else. Upgrades should be silent, automatic and provided for the reasonable lifetime of the device -- which for large durable appliances is decades -- and the cost for providing that lifetime support must be priced out up front for the consumer. We'll need regulation to make sure that happens.
Actually, for all of the commenters lamenting the idea of an Internet-connected toaster, etc., regulation requiring lifetime security updates would act as a useful counterweight to the tendency to needlessly connect All The Things. Providing automatic updates for the lifetime of the appliance (what, five years, for a toaster?) will add a non-trivial cost to the price of the toaster, making it much more likely that most toasters won't be connected unless connecting them enables some really compelling feature that is worth the money.
You jest, but you really should be able to take detailed measurements of yourself (not hard; but it helps to have a friend) and enter them into the web site, and then Amazon should be able to calculate how each piece of clothing will fit you...
The assumption is that Amazon has accurate clothing sizes from its vendors.
They're big enough to demand it. Or they could develop a solution to measure samples themselves.
NYC is a dramatically more space-constrained market, with housing densities two to three orders of magnitude higher. Put everyone in SV into NYC-style housing and you could bring back the orchards. Also, rent control has served to artificially increase prices in NYC.
somehow in the past decade, wanting to protect our borders from ILLEGAL immigrants, has turned into "all immigration is bad"
Our immigration laws suck and make it insanely hard for people to immigrate legally. If you give people no way to come legally they'll come illegally.
If you want to convince me that you really favor legal immigration, you need to start by learning about the problems with our immigration system and fix that. Heck, making it possible to immigrate legally will fix most of the illegal immigration problem! If you just fight to bring the hammer down on illegal immigrants while simultaneously maintaining the laws that make it impossible for them to come legally, then you clearly just hate immigrants, and no amount of protesting otherwise is going to convince me that you don't.
All this makes it brutally hard to buy clothes that fit based on measurements!
Soon enough we'll get rid of rack sizing entirely and you'll just provide your detailed body measurements (like a tailor would take, but measured with your smartphone) and the clothing will be custom made to fit. I give it 10 years at the outside.
Amazon should ship over a Tailor to get your size.
You jest, but you really should be able to take detailed measurements of yourself (not hard; but it helps to have a friend) and enter them into the web site, and then Amazon should be able to calculate how each piece of clothing will fit you and show you an image of a virtual dummy shaped like you with the clothes on it. This would not be easy, and would probably require both some serious research modeling how various fabrics fall on different shapes, and some method of acquiring very detailed data on the construction of each piece of clothing, including variation within sizes.
Couple this with something like Google's project Tango and maybe there's a future in which you strip down, point your phone camera at yourself and have your phone generate a detailed 3D model of your body, then send that model to an online clothing retailer, which can show you exactly how something will fit. Actually the logical next step is to get rid of rack sizing entirely and have each piece of clothing custom-created (by robots) to exactly your measurements.
Super easy returns are clearly just a stopgap towards the eventual perfect fitting.
One can't add an arbitrary 2FA scheme to Google without a phone number.
Hmm. It used to be possible. Maybe it's not any more.
Is this because Google doesn't trust me to keep track of my actual 2FA setup and wants to give me a recovery option?
If you really can't do it without a phone number, that's probably part of the reason. I mean, if you use the Authenticator app and then drop your phone in the toilet you will lose access to your account. You can (and should!) print out recovery codes, and store them safely, but if they and your phone are in your house and it burns down...
Personally, I have a couple of security keys as my primary 2FA methods, plus the Authenticator app on my phone, plus two backup phone numbers (mine and my wife's), and recovery codes printed and stored in two places (one in the safe in my house and one in my dad's safe at his house). You may required less redundancy:-)
Anyway, I tried to test setting up 2FA without a phone number myself, and couldn't. I don't have any gmail accounts that don't already have a phone number (and don't already have 2FA), so I tried to create a new one... and it looks like it's now impossible to create a new gmail account without entering a phone number. Thinking about it, I suspect that's an anti-abuse measure.
Last year, the Google abuse team reached out to me to ask me to add some features to Android that they can use to limit the ability of people to use Android devices to create large numbers of gmail accounts. They explained that people creating and selling thousands of gmail accounts to fraudsters is a big problem, both for the fraud and the blowback on Google that it creates. I don't know but suspect that they probably imposed the requirement that all new accounts verify a phone number (well, probably all new accounts in geographies where it's reasonable to do so) as one way to limit mass account creation.
The same logic doesn't apply to already-existing accounts, but the presence of a verified phone number may be a signal in other abuse- and security-related decision processes, since it's a moderate indicator that the account owner is a real person.
Or do they just want my phone number?
What would they do with your phone number? They're not going to call you.
If there's a way to get around this, please let me know.
Well, you could give them someone else's phone number:-)
Actually, in all seriousness, if you're worried about the number being used to correlate data with some other source, why not confound it by using a number of someone who is not you and with whom you don't have a particular relationship? Use a payphone, if you can find one. Then after you've set up your preferred 2FA (and printed out some recovery codes to keep in a safe place), remove the number from the account so it can't be used as a 2FA.
I was able to remove the phone number from one of my accounts. Then when I signed in from an Incognito window (using 2FA), I was able to log into gmail without any nag about adding a phone number, so I suspect that approach works.
Honestly, though, I'd recommend using your real phone number and leaving it on there as an account recovery option.
I had my Samsung S5 for over a year before I realized that the drop down top bar with the wifi/location/etc buttons can actually be HELD and it'll go into a sub-menu for configuration.
In the stock Android version, you don't long-press. Instead, there's a bar and below that a section which is a separate "button" which you tap to get into the settings for that. There's a "pulldown" arrow in that section that clues you into the fact that you can tap there to get into other stuff.
IMNSHO, most of what Samsung does to the Android UI damages it, rather than improving it. The stock UI also has its share of non-obvious controls, but I don't think there are nearly as many. An example from Nougat (and O) is that long-pressing the "recent apps" button starts a split-screen session.
No, not extreme. ANYTHING political. Criticize anything Trump said and you offend one half of the population.
But not enough to scare away advertisers. Lots of YouTube videos criticize Trump and lots applaud Trump, and both sorts get ads. It takes something much more extreme to trigger advertisers to be worried.
In any case, the better strategy is to try to attack the root problem, the limited supply of housing. Increasing supply may actually bring housing prices down, which benefits everyone (other than those who bought at inflated prices). Of course, 300 units isn't going to do it, but I'm sure this is just a test. If it goes well, I'm sure they'll put in a lot more.
Yes, I gave the short version. I suppose I could have said "obliged to take the content down if they want to avoid being sued". And you're right that they have no obligation to restore it after receiving the counterclaim.
So pretty much anything political is out the window.
Anything sufficiently extreme, yes. Such is the nature of ad-supported media. Note that I'm not claiming YouTube applies this rule very accurately or consistently, especially not right now when they're madly trying to retool to address the recent batch of advertiser withdrawals. But the general principle that advertisers get to decide what sorts of content their ads show on makes perfect sense.
On the other hand, because on YouTube ads can just be removed from the specific types of videos that advertisers dislike, YouTube is actually more tolerant of extreme views than a newspaper could be. Allowing extreme views in the editorial page -- even deciding to print sufficiently extreme letters from readers -- can cause advertisers to pull their ads from the paper completely, thus giving advertisers even greater influence over the content that is published. The same could happen with YouTube, but advertisers seem content as long as they can be certain their ad isn't juxtaposed directly to offensive content.
to offer loans to their employees in exchange for equity sharing. Google could under write (or more likely secure funds from other lenders) home loans with the proviso they get some % percentage of the increase in value when the home is sold.
That would make bay area property owners happy, since it would increase the ability of highly-paid Google employees to pay even higher prices, thereby driving property values up more.
Giving the nature of the market such a move might raise prices a bit but given bidding wars already occur I doubt the impact would be vary noticable.
I don't. It would increase the ability of Google employees to bid by some percentage, which would raise prices by almost exactly that percentage. Especially since it's not uncommon that Google employees are bidding against each other.
Google soft censors based on political or cultural message.
"Soft censorship" is a ridiculous expansion of the notion of censorship. Freedom of speech says that you have a right to speak your mind, not that you have a right to demand payment for doing so. Historically, it's actually been on the speaker (or someone sympathetic to them) to pay for the dissemination of their message to large audiences. Being able to do it for free is a step forward, not backward. The fact that someone managed to get paid by YouTube's advertisers in the past in no way means that anyone is obligated to continue paying them.
I've seen arguments that roughly say 'you're free to create your own video hosting platform
Such arguments are silly, because there's nothing preventing you from using YouTube's video hosting platform to deliver your message (unless it's hate speech, etc.). You won't get paid for it if the advertisers don't want to associate the ads with your content, but creating your own video hosting platform wouldn't help with that, because the advertisers aren't going to want to be there, either.
Dishonestly limiting the reach of messages opposed to your political interests while hiding behind 'hate speech' and 'think of the children/advertisers' rhetoric is not moral high-ground position
What sort of messages opposed to Google's "political interest" are you talking about? Anti net-neutrality messages?
Copyright strikes are abused, Google allows them by 3rd parties against the original artist provided they're against someone small
I agree there are problems for small content owners. The DMCA process doesn't scale very well, and YouTube addresses this with pre-emptive arrangements with big entities, but that doesn't work for small ones. I disagree with the three-strikes policy. I understand its motivation, but I don't think it's the right solution.
That's odd. I would have expected advertisers, usually being large corporations, to be more on par with the conservative narrative than the liberal one...
Anything that offends roughly half of the population is going to be something they want to stay away from, regardless of notions of which political stripe it falls under.
So the content is not offensive enough to actually slander someone or incite violence
I don't think YouTube's policies prohibit slander. If someone publishes a video slandering you, I think your only recourse is a lawsuit, same as in "old media".
So the content is not offensive enough to actually slander someone or incite violence, which would justify taking it down, but just in the "we don't like your opinion" ballpark?
More precisely, in the "our advertisers don't want to show their ads next to your opinion" ballpark.
to offer loans to their employees in exchange for equity sharing. Google could under write (or more likely secure funds from other lenders) home loans with the proviso they get some % percentage of the increase in value when the home is sold.
That would make bay area property owners happy, since it would increase the ability of highly-paid Google employees to pay even higher prices, thereby driving property values up more.
Slashdot Mirror
getting into Harvard is also almost impossible. maybe we should all just start going illegally.
Do you really want to equate immigrating to the US with attending Harvard? You can't get into Harvard by being born in some particular place; start putting requirements on being in the US and a lot of Americans are going to have to leave.
Before anyone starts ranting that Walmart is not a monopoly, there are two kinds of monopolies. Horizontal where the company controls a particular step of the process across the entire market, and vertical, where the company controls every aspect from beginning to end as much as possible and dictates all aspects of everything that the company deals with.
Poppycock.
The notion of a vertical monopoly does exist, but it's used to describe a monopoly (controller of nearly 100% of a market) that achieved its monopoly status through vertical integration. It is not the case that any vertically-integrated company is a monopoly, even if they have achieved total vertical integration. As long as there is still substantial competition at each level in the supply chain, it isn't a monopoly in any of them. If competition has effectively been eliminated at any level in the supply chain, then the company is a monopoly at that level regardless of how integrated they are at other levels.
Wal-mart might well be a regional monopoly, in the sense that there are regions of the country where they have driven all competing retailers out of business, but they're not a monopoly in general. And it's further possible that they'll eventually leverage vertical integration to become a general monopoly. But they're not now.
Not in my house, it won't.
Better stock up on all the appliances you're going to need for the rest of your life, then. Because in a few years it's going to be very hard to buy appliances that don't connect.
He's probably right about the push towards having to be online, but I fail to see how an IoT firewall should mitigate it.
+1.
Firewalls were never more than a half-baked stopgap anyway, intended to band-aid over the problem that system design and implementation sucked (anti-virus is the same thing, but much, much worse -- we're getting that right with the mobile iteration, at least).
The right answer is not to employ firewalls to block access to ports that shouldn't be open... the ports just shouldn't be open. Devices should only respond to packets they're supposed to respond to, and should encrypt and authenticate the connections they are supposed to allow (which a firewall really couldn't do) using standard protocols implemented in common and well-scrutinized libraries, and should blackhole everything else. Upgrades should be silent, automatic and provided for the reasonable lifetime of the device -- which for large durable appliances is decades -- and the cost for providing that lifetime support must be priced out up front for the consumer. We'll need regulation to make sure that happens.
Actually, for all of the commenters lamenting the idea of an Internet-connected toaster, etc., regulation requiring lifetime security updates would act as a useful counterweight to the tendency to needlessly connect All The Things. Providing automatic updates for the lifetime of the appliance (what, five years, for a toaster?) will add a non-trivial cost to the price of the toaster, making it much more likely that most toasters won't be connected unless connecting them enables some really compelling feature that is worth the money.
They can't even keep counterfeits out of their system. I don't see them having much luck enforcing size labelling.
Meh. Who cares about counterfeits? Not the customers; if they did they'd return the counterfeits in large enough volumes to make Amazon care.
On the radio today, they said this heatwave (7 days of 49C IIRC) is a one in 200 year thing and hasn't happened since last year.
And there probably won't be another summer like this until next year.
The assumption is that Amazon has accurate clothing sizes from its vendors.
They're big enough to demand it. Or they could develop a solution to measure samples themselves.
NYC is a dramatically more space-constrained market, with housing densities two to three orders of magnitude higher. Put everyone in SV into NYC-style housing and you could bring back the orchards. Also, rent control has served to artificially increase prices in NYC.
somehow in the past decade, wanting to protect our borders from ILLEGAL immigrants, has turned into "all immigration is bad"
Our immigration laws suck and make it insanely hard for people to immigrate legally. If you give people no way to come legally they'll come illegally.
If you want to convince me that you really favor legal immigration, you need to start by learning about the problems with our immigration system and fix that. Heck, making it possible to immigrate legally will fix most of the illegal immigration problem! If you just fight to bring the hammer down on illegal immigrants while simultaneously maintaining the laws that make it impossible for them to come legally, then you clearly just hate immigrants, and no amount of protesting otherwise is going to convince me that you don't.
All this makes it brutally hard to buy clothes that fit based on measurements!
Soon enough we'll get rid of rack sizing entirely and you'll just provide your detailed body measurements (like a tailor would take, but measured with your smartphone) and the clothing will be custom made to fit. I give it 10 years at the outside.
Amazon should ship over a Tailor to get your size.
You jest, but you really should be able to take detailed measurements of yourself (not hard; but it helps to have a friend) and enter them into the web site, and then Amazon should be able to calculate how each piece of clothing will fit you and show you an image of a virtual dummy shaped like you with the clothes on it. This would not be easy, and would probably require both some serious research modeling how various fabrics fall on different shapes, and some method of acquiring very detailed data on the construction of each piece of clothing, including variation within sizes.
Couple this with something like Google's project Tango and maybe there's a future in which you strip down, point your phone camera at yourself and have your phone generate a detailed 3D model of your body, then send that model to an online clothing retailer, which can show you exactly how something will fit. Actually the logical next step is to get rid of rack sizing entirely and have each piece of clothing custom-created (by robots) to exactly your measurements.
Super easy returns are clearly just a stopgap towards the eventual perfect fitting.
One can't add an arbitrary 2FA scheme to Google without a phone number.
Hmm. It used to be possible. Maybe it's not any more.
Is this because Google doesn't trust me to keep track of my actual 2FA setup and wants to give me a recovery option?
If you really can't do it without a phone number, that's probably part of the reason. I mean, if you use the Authenticator app and then drop your phone in the toilet you will lose access to your account. You can (and should!) print out recovery codes, and store them safely, but if they and your phone are in your house and it burns down...
Personally, I have a couple of security keys as my primary 2FA methods, plus the Authenticator app on my phone, plus two backup phone numbers (mine and my wife's), and recovery codes printed and stored in two places (one in the safe in my house and one in my dad's safe at his house). You may required less redundancy :-)
Anyway, I tried to test setting up 2FA without a phone number myself, and couldn't. I don't have any gmail accounts that don't already have a phone number (and don't already have 2FA), so I tried to create a new one... and it looks like it's now impossible to create a new gmail account without entering a phone number. Thinking about it, I suspect that's an anti-abuse measure.
Last year, the Google abuse team reached out to me to ask me to add some features to Android that they can use to limit the ability of people to use Android devices to create large numbers of gmail accounts. They explained that people creating and selling thousands of gmail accounts to fraudsters is a big problem, both for the fraud and the blowback on Google that it creates. I don't know but suspect that they probably imposed the requirement that all new accounts verify a phone number (well, probably all new accounts in geographies where it's reasonable to do so) as one way to limit mass account creation.
The same logic doesn't apply to already-existing accounts, but the presence of a verified phone number may be a signal in other abuse- and security-related decision processes, since it's a moderate indicator that the account owner is a real person.
Or do they just want my phone number?
What would they do with your phone number? They're not going to call you.
If there's a way to get around this, please let me know.
Well, you could give them someone else's phone number :-)
Actually, in all seriousness, if you're worried about the number being used to correlate data with some other source, why not confound it by using a number of someone who is not you and with whom you don't have a particular relationship? Use a payphone, if you can find one. Then after you've set up your preferred 2FA (and printed out some recovery codes to keep in a safe place), remove the number from the account so it can't be used as a 2FA.
I was able to remove the phone number from one of my accounts. Then when I signed in from an Incognito window (using 2FA), I was able to log into gmail without any nag about adding a phone number, so I suspect that approach works.
Honestly, though, I'd recommend using your real phone number and leaving it on there as an account recovery option.
The question is, do their makers get the ad revenue?
If ads run, the ad revenue is shared. I'm not sure I understand the question.
Limited land isn't the problem. Zoning rules barring high density housing are. Just gotta build up.
I had my Samsung S5 for over a year before I realized that the drop down top bar with the wifi/location/etc buttons can actually be HELD and it'll go into a sub-menu for configuration.
In the stock Android version, you don't long-press. Instead, there's a bar and below that a section which is a separate "button" which you tap to get into the settings for that. There's a "pulldown" arrow in that section that clues you into the fact that you can tap there to get into other stuff.
IMNSHO, most of what Samsung does to the Android UI damages it, rather than improving it. The stock UI also has its share of non-obvious controls, but I don't think there are nearly as many. An example from Nougat (and O) is that long-pressing the "recent apps" button starts a split-screen session.
Why is that? Does Mail.app not support IMAP4 properly?
No, not extreme. ANYTHING political. Criticize anything Trump said and you offend one half of the population.
But not enough to scare away advertisers. Lots of YouTube videos criticize Trump and lots applaud Trump, and both sorts get ads. It takes something much more extreme to trigger advertisers to be worried.
In any case, the better strategy is to try to attack the root problem, the limited supply of housing. Increasing supply may actually bring housing prices down, which benefits everyone (other than those who bought at inflated prices). Of course, 300 units isn't going to do it, but I'm sure this is just a test. If it goes well, I'm sure they'll put in a lot more.
Yes, I gave the short version. I suppose I could have said "obliged to take the content down if they want to avoid being sued". And you're right that they have no obligation to restore it after receiving the counterclaim.
So pretty much anything political is out the window.
Anything sufficiently extreme, yes. Such is the nature of ad-supported media. Note that I'm not claiming YouTube applies this rule very accurately or consistently, especially not right now when they're madly trying to retool to address the recent batch of advertiser withdrawals. But the general principle that advertisers get to decide what sorts of content their ads show on makes perfect sense.
On the other hand, because on YouTube ads can just be removed from the specific types of videos that advertisers dislike, YouTube is actually more tolerant of extreme views than a newspaper could be. Allowing extreme views in the editorial page -- even deciding to print sufficiently extreme letters from readers -- can cause advertisers to pull their ads from the paper completely, thus giving advertisers even greater influence over the content that is published. The same could happen with YouTube, but advertisers seem content as long as they can be certain their ad isn't juxtaposed directly to offensive content.
to offer loans to their employees in exchange for equity sharing. Google could under write (or more likely secure funds from other lenders) home loans with the proviso they get some % percentage of the increase in value when the home is sold.
That would make bay area property owners happy, since it would increase the ability of highly-paid Google employees to pay even higher prices, thereby driving property values up more.
Giving the nature of the market such a move might raise prices a bit but given bidding wars already occur I doubt the impact would be vary noticable.
I don't. It would increase the ability of Google employees to bid by some percentage, which would raise prices by almost exactly that percentage. Especially since it's not uncommon that Google employees are bidding against each other.
Google soft censors based on political or cultural message.
"Soft censorship" is a ridiculous expansion of the notion of censorship. Freedom of speech says that you have a right to speak your mind, not that you have a right to demand payment for doing so. Historically, it's actually been on the speaker (or someone sympathetic to them) to pay for the dissemination of their message to large audiences. Being able to do it for free is a step forward, not backward. The fact that someone managed to get paid by YouTube's advertisers in the past in no way means that anyone is obligated to continue paying them.
I've seen arguments that roughly say 'you're free to create your own video hosting platform
Such arguments are silly, because there's nothing preventing you from using YouTube's video hosting platform to deliver your message (unless it's hate speech, etc.). You won't get paid for it if the advertisers don't want to associate the ads with your content, but creating your own video hosting platform wouldn't help with that, because the advertisers aren't going to want to be there, either.
Dishonestly limiting the reach of messages opposed to your political interests while hiding behind 'hate speech' and 'think of the children/advertisers' rhetoric is not moral high-ground position
What sort of messages opposed to Google's "political interest" are you talking about? Anti net-neutrality messages?
Copyright strikes are abused, Google allows them by 3rd parties against the original artist provided they're against someone small
I agree there are problems for small content owners. The DMCA process doesn't scale very well, and YouTube addresses this with pre-emptive arrangements with big entities, but that doesn't work for small ones. I disagree with the three-strikes policy. I understand its motivation, but I don't think it's the right solution.
or politics they don't favor.
That's a bold claim. Got any evidence?
That's odd. I would have expected advertisers, usually being large corporations, to be more on par with the conservative narrative than the liberal one...
Anything that offends roughly half of the population is going to be something they want to stay away from, regardless of notions of which political stripe it falls under.
So the content is not offensive enough to actually slander someone or incite violence
I don't think YouTube's policies prohibit slander. If someone publishes a video slandering you, I think your only recourse is a lawsuit, same as in "old media".
So the content is not offensive enough to actually slander someone or incite violence, which would justify taking it down, but just in the "we don't like your opinion" ballpark?
More precisely, in the "our advertisers don't want to show their ads next to your opinion" ballpark.
to offer loans to their employees in exchange for equity sharing. Google could under write (or more likely secure funds from other lenders) home loans with the proviso they get some % percentage of the increase in value when the home is sold.
That would make bay area property owners happy, since it would increase the ability of highly-paid Google employees to pay even higher prices, thereby driving property values up more.