This will be nice to get at work. There, Microsoft's Outlook Web Access constantly has bad authentication requests, but only on Firefox. Fortunately, I can tell which are the bad ones, because they say something like "the site says "mail.COMPANYNAME.com"". Entering a username/password never works, it just asks again, but cancelling makes the popup go away, for a time.
I'm not sure if it's a bug in OWA, or a misconfiguration made by the IT group. But they're very annoying and it's good to hear they might be suppressed in the future.
The problem with Clinton's email server wasn't that she had a personal mail server. That's kind of cool (well, until I found out she was running Exchange on it). The problem was the spillage of classified information through it. You do not discuss classified information on the unclassified domain. Period. Most of the time, that sort of thing involves a harsh prison sentence, so it's already very illegal. No new laws were needed, and it is very different from complying with open records laws.
If we're going to have time zones at all, then the right time tries to align noon with the sun's zenith. A balance of sunrise and sunset at equal distances from noon (or midnight). At least as best as possible, since there are variations throughout the year, as well as each location within the time zone. Daylight saving time aligns that high point of the sun with 1pm instead of noon.
Argentina is in UTC-3, even though it is entirely within the UTC-4 and UTC-5 regions (parts of it are the same longitude as New York City). Spain is in UTC+1 despite being directly south of the U.K. (UTC+0). And Spain then celebrates DST, making the sun's high point at 2pm or later. There are lots of other examples, though many of them occur at extreme latitudes where time zones have less meaning (and there are less people around to be affected).
What's interesting about the time zone map is how many time zones drift west of their natural boundaries. Almost none drift to the east. This already pushes for later sunrises and sunsets. It's clearly a strong human societal force, pushing for unbalanced time reckoning. There may be advantages to it, but they are psychological, existing in how people work. The same could be said for the concept of time zones itself.
I'm not really arguing against time zones or DST. Just hoping people would realize that DST is just about tricking people into getting up earlier. Though if enough people realized that, it probably would stop working:)
DST may have been an energy saver back when most people primarily used electricity for lighting. Now, not so much. Especially in warmer climates closer to the equator (where DST does very little anyway), DST tends to cause more energy usage in the form of residential air conditioners. Also, all those people doing things in those "longer" evenings are probably causing more energy use. In more northern areas, getting up earlier when it is still dark and cold uses more lighting and heating energy. See Wikipedia for details. It's more complicated than what I wrote, but DST generally isn't much of a net win for the environment (nor is it really much of a net loss, either).
Frankly, if you setup your sleep schedule such that midnight is close to the middle of your sleep cycle, you won't have problems with it getting "dark way too early". Yes, this DOES mean waking up before 7am.
In reality, DST is a social solution, not a technological one. It's really hard to convince some people to wake up earlier like I just suggested. Kind of like it is hard to convince people to exercise and eat right. DST is simply a way to trick people who want to wake up at 7am to actually get up at 6. It's also why the switch is necessary to make it work. If we stayed on DST all year, then those "night owls" would just start sleeping later. Schools and businesses would start at 9 instead of 8, and people would start complaining that it was getting dark out too "early" because the sun is setting at 10pm and they don't want to go to sleep until 1am. And then we'll need double DST for part of the year.
Sometimes, it is amazing to me that it is easier to convince everyone to change their clocks to the wrong time instead of changing their schedules. I guess it's like programming -- change the underlying code (the time) rather than every place that uses it (the schedules). But still...
That's not how subsidies work. They generally do not tax the residents to give the company money (though I suppose they could). Instead, they take the form of "if you move to this area and employ X people at a salary of at least Y, we'll give you a Z% discount on your taxes". Since these are usually local deals, the taxes are usually property tax related, as that is the only taxes that the local government has power over. States might also chip in, which is where income tax reductions could come into play.
Now, in some ways, you're right. When the company comes in, it will probably raise other people's taxes by making their properties more valuable. So while the city and state might realize more tax revenue, it will be coming from higher taxes from the residents. Some of those residents will be completely new (most of the X above), so it's not always clear cut. And the company will probably want services (roads, fire & police protection, schools for their employee's kids, etc) that local governments provide. So there is a cost to having the company there.
The trick is to make sure that the incentive is lower than expected tax increase minus expected expense increase. Obviously governments can make mistakes in what they offer, or even just forecast wrong. But that doesn't mean that a large subsidy is automatically bad for the government or the citizens of the area.
For a city like New York with a thriving economy and a large tax base, the expected tax increase probably isn't really that big. If Amazon isn't there, someone else will be. For a small city without a lot of big businesses, the tax increase could be really big. Converting an empty field with very little tax revenue into a valuable office building with high tax revenue (even with subsidies) is usually a very big win.
The point is that subsidies are (or should be) about growing the population and tax base, not rearranging it. When done right, they are a net win for everyone. They do require oversight to ensure they are done right.
The math for figuring out the exact numbers seems to me to be really difficult. Though maybe not as difficult as tedious in thinking about the various possibilities. It would probably make a nice question on a discrete math final. Well, nice from the professor's point of view at least.
Since I didn't want to compute it analytically, I once wrote a simple program to test it empirically. The program would generate random passwords and then test to see if they met the requirements. IIRC, with the rules in place in my employer, it threw out about 70% of all random passwords. It got worse as the passwords got longer because of rules limiting the number of consecutive characters of the same class. I.e., "foo1bar2baz3" is OK, but "foobarbaz123" was not.
Interestingly, while the password space was significantly reduced, it wasn't even an order of magnitude, let alone the effect of making the password length shorter. I agree with the OP that password rules do eliminate good passwords, especially of the XKCD kind "correct horse battery staple" (too many lower case characters in a row, no upper case, numbers, or symbols). However, if we didn't have the rules, there would be quite a few people whose password would be "password". Or if there was a length requirement, it would be "passwordpassword". So I am of mixed feelings on it. Even if I think eventually only the password "aA1!bB2@cC3#dD4$" will be viable if the security rules get any tighter.
I wouldn't call the resellers parasitic. They buy the resources from the infrastructure owners, and somehow manage to sell it to customers. This is the same way that grocery stores buy food from farmers and other food producers and sell it to customers. For some reason, the resellers are cheaper than the original owners. Maybe that is through better efficiency. Maybe it is through lower profit margins. But on the face of it, they do not seem to be bad for the overall economy. Sure, they make it harder to charge extraordinarily high prices for cellular service, but that's not a bad thing for consumers.
Note that there could be a problem if the owners are forced through regulation to sell below cost, but I don't think that is the case.
As to the policy in question, I'd rather subsidies go to the cheaper resellers than the expensive owners.
If you're in the US, the NOAA website at https://www.weather.gov/ is probably your best bet. I know you can get radar images from there -- I clicked around enough at one point and found the raw frames nicely sorted by location. I'm fairly certain that's where all the weather sites get their data, anyway. With how bad places like Weather Underground has been getting lately (it keeps switching to a blank page on my smart phone for example and is otherwise insanely slow with all of its useless JS nonsense), I almost want to make my own weather site using that data. But haven't gotten around to it yet:)
Part of me would like to see the shutdown last exactly as long as it would take to balance the budget and pay off the national debt. What an interesting experiment THAT would be.... Of course, that can't happen (for pretty obvious reasons).
The real reason that cannot happen is that when every shutdown is resolved, the government pays all the federal workers for the time they were not working. So shutdowns don't actually save the federal government any money at all. It's all just politics and grandstanding.
It's hard to say how big a number it is because I don't know the denominator. Though in 2017, this number was 2 billion. 0.2% of 2 billion is 4 million devices. 0.3% is 6 million devices. In total, that is 10 million active devices. That's more than the number of people who live in New York City. It doesn't sound like a "very very small number" to me.
I'm also a big TST fan, and I've been sitting at FF 56 for a while because of incompatibility. But just recently I downloaded FF63 and was able to get TST working in it. It has been ported to the Web Extensions API as a sidebar. However, there are a few customizations you have to do manually to make it work really correctly. To get the full experience, you have to add the following to chrome/userChrome.css in your profile directory:
/* Hide horizontal tabs at the top of the window */ #main-window[tabsintitlebar="true"]:not([extradragspace="true"]) #TabsToolbar {
opacity: 0;
pointer-events: none; } #main-window:not([tabsintitlebar="true"]) #TabsToolbar {
visibility: collapse !important; }
/* Hide title for only Tree Style Tab sidebar */ #sidebar-box[sidebarcommand="treestyletab_piro_sakura_ne_jp-sidebar-action"] #sidebar-header {
display: none; }
I also went into the preferences for TST and to the advanced section to enable the CSS marking unread tabs in red text and then also added this:
/* no need for "x" to close, just middle click */ .closebox {
display: none; }
None of these came from myself, but from various Internet sources. The userChrome.css came from links TST gives you after installing. Removing the "x" came from a google search (I didn't save so cannot reference).
So, it takes a bit of work, but you can get tree style tab working in newer Firefox versions. The only real question is why tree style tabs aren't the default.
You think it's just stuff about Trump, but more likely you just noticed it there. I noticed a while ago that stories about technology (which I know a thing or two about) are usually also "a complete fabrication, a partial lie or a spin on facts." Somehow, I get the impression that a story about a local parade would probably fall into one of those three. Probably all of them at different points if the story is long enough. Not to long ago, I was involved as a volunteer in a STEM education event that was covered by local media. The reporter interviewed the main organizer of the event, and got his name wrong. Despite the fact that the event had a wireless microphone he could use so he referred to himself as "wireless Mike."
Normally, I'd just attribute these things to incompetence, but it seems like it happens so much, even that strains credulity. As the old saying goes, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
So, by that logic, Twitter shouldn't be allowed to "de-platform" him, right?
What does Twitter have to do with free speech? They are a private company.
I'm just arguing for consistency. Personally, I think the bakery (another private company) should have made the cake. If it really annoyed the baker, he could have offered to do so at a higher than normal price. The the couple accepted, then he gets some extra money for biting his tongue.
But I really can't understand how you don't think that Twitter doesn't have anything to do with free speech. Speech is all Twitter is! If speech isn't free, then Twitter will eventually crumble. From a purely business point of view, if there is anyone who should be 100% behind the idea of people being able to express whatever abhorrent opinion crosses their tiny minds, it should be Twitter. Of course, just like bakeries can be run by people who don't see how excluding people can ruin them, so can Internet companies.
How to deal with it? Simple - don't. I know it's hard for the business world where bribery, er "treating the customer well" with lavish gifts, dinners, drinks, vacations, etc, is somehow considered normal, but that should stop. Yes, it's nice to be on the receiving end of that, but it raises the costs for everyone.
For a company like Microsoft, which is a virtual monopoly, it's completely unnecessary. What is the Hungry government going to do, not buy Word and Excel licenses? I could understand the question if this were some small company trying to break into the market, but Microsoft?
Worst case, you don't go into that market. If bribes are required, don't go. Bribing your way in will just increase the cost of your product for everyone. And if your product is really that good, then the country that "requires" bribes will miss out and either change its ways or do without. If it really bugs you, document as best as possible the bribery of your competitors. If they are US based (or owned by a US company), turn them in for violations of FCPA. Or just explain the bribery to any shareholder/investor/reporter that asks about it. No one (at least in the US) is going to really say that the company should have resorted to bribery.
So no, there are no places where you "have" to bribe. There are alternatives -- they are just harder (and don't enrich your friends or relatives with company cash).
By the way, the court decided that the bakery thing wasn't a freedom of speech issue because no reasonable person would think that the message on the cake was the speech of the baker, but rather the speech of the couple.
Yet no reasonable person would think that a tweet from Alex Jones is the speech of Twitter, but rather the speech of Alex Jones. So, by that logic, Twitter shouldn't be allowed to "de-platform" him, right?
I personally barely know who Alex Jones is and have never watched/read/listened to him (I'm not even sure what his preferred medium is), but I am a fan of letting people open their mouths wide enough to stick their feet in. Often myself included:)
IANAL either, but my understanding is that insider information always exists. Using insider information to make stock purchases or sells is considered illegal. For example, if Musk knew he was going to tweet what he did and bought a bunch of Tesla right before that to make a bunch of money when the stock went up, that would be insider trading.
However, when the company (or an officer of the company) makes that information public, it is not really insider information any more. Twitter being very public, it would be hard to argue that Musk's tweet was insider information after the tweet.
So all that's left whether releasing that information is OK. There may be some rules I'm not aware of, but as long as the tweet was honest and made in good faith (i.e., not a lie or deception) there's nothing wrong. Consider a case where a pharmaceutical company makes a surprise announcement of a cure for some disease. That would probably make their stock go up, and short sellers wouldn't have any recourse. Why would they? They bet against the stock and they were wrong. Too bad. You gamble and you lost.
Maybe a bigger problem is that a stock's value swings wildly based on Twitter and not based on solid financial data. But that's a larger problem in the market, not specific to Tesla.
Nobody really likes doing business with Amazon at the corporate tier because you never know when Jeff is going to decide to consume your market for himself.
Good point, but hasn't that been Microsoft's modus operandi for many decades? It's not like partnering with Microsoft in the past has often ended up a good thing for the non-Microsoft partner. I suppose for Walmart, Microsoft is probably the lesser of two evils here, but it's still not a great choice.
There are all sorts of government laws that prevent peoples' FREEDOM to enter into (some) contracts. For example, you cannot sell yourself into slavery. You cannot enter into a contract to kill someone. And so on. Generally, these restrictions are regarded as good things for the larger society, even though it may negatively affect some sub group (like hitmen).
Your union contract is actually very similar to these non-complete clauses being discussed here. The worker didn't sign this contract, but is being affected by its consequences by being forced to join the union and pay union dues in order to take a job. While that sort of contract is good for the union, is it good for the workers affected by it or for society at large? You might think so, but consider that it has negatives as well. For example, competing unions that might offer lower dues (better efficiency) or want to negotiate a different employment package better suited to some employees. But under a monopoly agreement, those would not be possible.
With vertical space at a premium, you should look into the Tree Style Tab extension for Firefox. It puts your tabs down the side, and also organizes them in a tree structure, so that new tabs open under the tab they were opened from. You can collapse groups of tabs as needed. Personally, I don't know why all the major browsers keep tabs on the top. With widescreeen monitors (at least on desktops/laptops), tabs on the side makes much more sense.
Of course, I had to stay on FF56 to avoid losing my TST extension, though I think the latest version of FF re-enables some features to allow it to work properly again.
Do brick & mortar vendors near state lines need to start checking IDs so they can charge the right sales tax to each customer based on their home address? That's where they are "delivering" the items to, right?
In some places, there are very different tax rates on things like cigarettes, such that smokers have a strong incentive to drive across the state line to purchase cigarettes at a lower rate. States have gone after these smokers for violating their home states' tax laws by not paying the higher tax. With this ruling, will they go after the vendor instead?
Another example: I've often seen in tourist locations vendors offering to ship (especially large) items their customers buy so they don't have to try to pack it in their luggage. Will those vendors have to collect and remit sales taxes to tourists' home states?
In the real world, the tax that applies is always where the vendor is, not where the item will eventually end up. But for some reason, in the virtual Internet world, everyone thinks the opposite should be true. That is what doesn't make sense.
But I look forward to going into Walmarts in other states and demanding that they calculate tax based on my home state (and remit it there, too).
You're right that Congress should act and that it probably won't. But they don't have to do much. Simply create a law that says that any transaction that takes place where the seller and buyer are in different jurisdictions is governed by the taxing regulations of the seller. Then all the sellers on the Internet will have to collect sales tax, but only for one jurisdiction -- their own.
Yes, places like South Dakota will be upset because they probably have more buyers than sellers, but it's the solution that makes the most sense. It also follows real world analogies. For example, there is a shopping area near me that is a special taxing district that has a slightly higher sales tax rate to help pay for its development. They don't care that I'm going to "ship" anything I buy there somewhere that doesn't have that higher rate (my house). The transaction took place at the vendor's location, not where the item is shipped.
Just enshrine that in Federal law and be done with it.
What makes you think that when I order something from a website that the "transaction" is taking place where I am located? Why is it not based on where the vendor is located? Worse, places like Amazon charge sales tax based on where an item is shipped, which may not be a state where either I or Amazon is located!
Personally, I think website businesses should collect sales taxes based on the state where the business is incorporated. After all, customers "go" to a website to buy something. Our language implies the act of the customer travelling, at least virtually, to the place that the vendor is located to conduct the transaction.
Or if this ruling really enshrines the idea that where an item is to be used is where taxes should be paid, does that mean if I'm travelling, forget a charger, and buy a replacement from a local Best Buy, I can demand they charge my home state's sales tax and that they remit that money to my home state? After all, Best Buy does have stores in my home state, so it shouldn't be too much of a burden, right?
Where I live in Florida, fertilizer is considered a pollutant. This is because when it rains it collects in the waterways. There, it does its job by getting plant material to grow in the form of algae. These algae blooms can get so thick that they end up killing the animal life. Sometimes, the blooms are toxic to humans and create really bad smells.
The point is that fertilizer is not always good and concentrations from run-off can have unintended consequences.
Microsoft makes money from people running Windows. In license fees for Windows, and in license fees for Windows applications (which are built by developers running Windows). If people are running Ubuntu, they aren't running Windows, and not making money for Microsoft.
Further, there's "secure" boot to consider. Right now, it is optional. But if users can run Linux applications under Windows, then why do they need to run Linux kernel natively? And if they don't need to run the Linux kernel, then there's no reason for SecureBoot to allow it.
So look forward to a future where you won't be able to run the Linux kernel at all, and through that, have real trouble running a truly Free system. That's the end game for WSL.
Slashdot Mirror
This will be nice to get at work. There, Microsoft's Outlook Web Access constantly has bad authentication requests, but only on Firefox. Fortunately, I can tell which are the bad ones, because they say something like "the site says "mail.COMPANYNAME.com"". Entering a username/password never works, it just asks again, but cancelling makes the popup go away, for a time.
I'm not sure if it's a bug in OWA, or a misconfiguration made by the IT group. But they're very annoying and it's good to hear they might be suppressed in the future.
The problem with Clinton's email server wasn't that she had a personal mail server. That's kind of cool (well, until I found out she was running Exchange on it). The problem was the spillage of classified information through it. You do not discuss classified information on the unclassified domain. Period. Most of the time, that sort of thing involves a harsh prison sentence, so it's already very illegal. No new laws were needed, and it is very different from complying with open records laws.
If we're going to have time zones at all, then the right time tries to align noon with the sun's zenith. A balance of sunrise and sunset at equal distances from noon (or midnight). At least as best as possible, since there are variations throughout the year, as well as each location within the time zone. Daylight saving time aligns that high point of the sun with 1pm instead of noon.
Some countries are worse than others in this:
World_Time_Zones_Map.png
DST_Countries_Map.png
Argentina is in UTC-3, even though it is entirely within the UTC-4 and UTC-5 regions (parts of it are the same longitude as New York City). Spain is in UTC+1 despite being directly south of the U.K. (UTC+0). And Spain then celebrates DST, making the sun's high point at 2pm or later. There are lots of other examples, though many of them occur at extreme latitudes where time zones have less meaning (and there are less people around to be affected).
What's interesting about the time zone map is how many time zones drift west of their natural boundaries. Almost none drift to the east. This already pushes for later sunrises and sunsets. It's clearly a strong human societal force, pushing for unbalanced time reckoning. There may be advantages to it, but they are psychological, existing in how people work. The same could be said for the concept of time zones itself.
I'm not really arguing against time zones or DST. Just hoping people would realize that DST is just about tricking people into getting up earlier. Though if enough people realized that, it probably would stop working :)
DST may have been an energy saver back when most people primarily used electricity for lighting. Now, not so much. Especially in warmer climates closer to the equator (where DST does very little anyway), DST tends to cause more energy usage in the form of residential air conditioners. Also, all those people doing things in those "longer" evenings are probably causing more energy use. In more northern areas, getting up earlier when it is still dark and cold uses more lighting and heating energy. See Wikipedia for details. It's more complicated than what I wrote, but DST generally isn't much of a net win for the environment (nor is it really much of a net loss, either).
Frankly, if you setup your sleep schedule such that midnight is close to the middle of your sleep cycle, you won't have problems with it getting "dark way too early". Yes, this DOES mean waking up before 7am.
In reality, DST is a social solution, not a technological one. It's really hard to convince some people to wake up earlier like I just suggested. Kind of like it is hard to convince people to exercise and eat right. DST is simply a way to trick people who want to wake up at 7am to actually get up at 6. It's also why the switch is necessary to make it work. If we stayed on DST all year, then those "night owls" would just start sleeping later. Schools and businesses would start at 9 instead of 8, and people would start complaining that it was getting dark out too "early" because the sun is setting at 10pm and they don't want to go to sleep until 1am. And then we'll need double DST for part of the year.
Sometimes, it is amazing to me that it is easier to convince everyone to change their clocks to the wrong time instead of changing their schedules. I guess it's like programming -- change the underlying code (the time) rather than every place that uses it (the schedules). But still...
That's not how subsidies work. They generally do not tax the residents to give the company money (though I suppose they could). Instead, they take the form of "if you move to this area and employ X people at a salary of at least Y, we'll give you a Z% discount on your taxes". Since these are usually local deals, the taxes are usually property tax related, as that is the only taxes that the local government has power over. States might also chip in, which is where income tax reductions could come into play.
Now, in some ways, you're right. When the company comes in, it will probably raise other people's taxes by making their properties more valuable. So while the city and state might realize more tax revenue, it will be coming from higher taxes from the residents. Some of those residents will be completely new (most of the X above), so it's not always clear cut. And the company will probably want services (roads, fire & police protection, schools for their employee's kids, etc) that local governments provide. So there is a cost to having the company there.
The trick is to make sure that the incentive is lower than expected tax increase minus expected expense increase. Obviously governments can make mistakes in what they offer, or even just forecast wrong. But that doesn't mean that a large subsidy is automatically bad for the government or the citizens of the area.
For a city like New York with a thriving economy and a large tax base, the expected tax increase probably isn't really that big. If Amazon isn't there, someone else will be. For a small city without a lot of big businesses, the tax increase could be really big. Converting an empty field with very little tax revenue into a valuable office building with high tax revenue (even with subsidies) is usually a very big win.
The point is that subsidies are (or should be) about growing the population and tax base, not rearranging it. When done right, they are a net win for everyone. They do require oversight to ensure they are done right.
The math for figuring out the exact numbers seems to me to be really difficult. Though maybe not as difficult as tedious in thinking about the various possibilities. It would probably make a nice question on a discrete math final. Well, nice from the professor's point of view at least.
Since I didn't want to compute it analytically, I once wrote a simple program to test it empirically. The program would generate random passwords and then test to see if they met the requirements. IIRC, with the rules in place in my employer, it threw out about 70% of all random passwords. It got worse as the passwords got longer because of rules limiting the number of consecutive characters of the same class. I.e., "foo1bar2baz3" is OK, but "foobarbaz123" was not.
Interestingly, while the password space was significantly reduced, it wasn't even an order of magnitude, let alone the effect of making the password length shorter. I agree with the OP that password rules do eliminate good passwords, especially of the XKCD kind "correct horse battery staple" (too many lower case characters in a row, no upper case, numbers, or symbols). However, if we didn't have the rules, there would be quite a few people whose password would be "password". Or if there was a length requirement, it would be "passwordpassword". So I am of mixed feelings on it. Even if I think eventually only the password "aA1!bB2@cC3#dD4$" will be viable if the security rules get any tighter.
I wouldn't call the resellers parasitic. They buy the resources from the infrastructure owners, and somehow manage to sell it to customers. This is the same way that grocery stores buy food from farmers and other food producers and sell it to customers. For some reason, the resellers are cheaper than the original owners. Maybe that is through better efficiency. Maybe it is through lower profit margins. But on the face of it, they do not seem to be bad for the overall economy. Sure, they make it harder to charge extraordinarily high prices for cellular service, but that's not a bad thing for consumers.
Note that there could be a problem if the owners are forced through regulation to sell below cost, but I don't think that is the case.
As to the policy in question, I'd rather subsidies go to the cheaper resellers than the expensive owners.
If you're in the US, the NOAA website at https://www.weather.gov/ is probably your best bet. I know you can get radar images from there -- I clicked around enough at one point and found the raw frames nicely sorted by location. I'm fairly certain that's where all the weather sites get their data, anyway. With how bad places like Weather Underground has been getting lately (it keeps switching to a blank page on my smart phone for example and is otherwise insanely slow with all of its useless JS nonsense), I almost want to make my own weather site using that data. But haven't gotten around to it yet :)
The real reason that cannot happen is that when every shutdown is resolved, the government pays all the federal workers for the time they were not working. So shutdowns don't actually save the federal government any money at all. It's all just politics and grandstanding.
It's hard to say how big a number it is because I don't know the denominator. Though in 2017, this number was 2 billion. 0.2% of 2 billion is 4 million devices. 0.3% is 6 million devices. In total, that is 10 million active devices. That's more than the number of people who live in New York City. It doesn't sound like a "very very small number" to me.
I'm also a big TST fan, and I've been sitting at FF 56 for a while because of incompatibility. But just recently I downloaded FF63 and was able to get TST working in it. It has been ported to the Web Extensions API as a sidebar. However, there are a few customizations you have to do manually to make it work really correctly. To get the full experience, you have to add the following to chrome/userChrome.css in your profile directory:
I also went into the preferences for TST and to the advanced section to enable the CSS marking unread tabs in red text and then also added this:
None of these came from myself, but from various Internet sources. The userChrome.css came from links TST gives you after installing. Removing the "x" came from a google search (I didn't save so cannot reference).
So, it takes a bit of work, but you can get tree style tab working in newer Firefox versions. The only real question is why tree style tabs aren't the default.
You think it's just stuff about Trump, but more likely you just noticed it there. I noticed a while ago that stories about technology (which I know a thing or two about) are usually also "a complete fabrication, a partial lie or a spin on facts." Somehow, I get the impression that a story about a local parade would probably fall into one of those three. Probably all of them at different points if the story is long enough. Not to long ago, I was involved as a volunteer in a STEM education event that was covered by local media. The reporter interviewed the main organizer of the event, and got his name wrong. Despite the fact that the event had a wireless microphone he could use so he referred to himself as "wireless Mike."
Normally, I'd just attribute these things to incompetence, but it seems like it happens so much, even that strains credulity. As the old saying goes, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...
I don't think I could have gotten that integral even back in high school when I was good at integrating.
But your point about teaching kinds to be more responsible with money is well taken.
I'm just arguing for consistency. Personally, I think the bakery (another private company) should have made the cake. If it really annoyed the baker, he could have offered to do so at a higher than normal price. The the couple accepted, then he gets some extra money for biting his tongue.
But I really can't understand how you don't think that Twitter doesn't have anything to do with free speech. Speech is all Twitter is! If speech isn't free, then Twitter will eventually crumble. From a purely business point of view, if there is anyone who should be 100% behind the idea of people being able to express whatever abhorrent opinion crosses their tiny minds, it should be Twitter. Of course, just like bakeries can be run by people who don't see how excluding people can ruin them, so can Internet companies.
How to deal with it? Simple - don't. I know it's hard for the business world where bribery, er "treating the customer well" with lavish gifts, dinners, drinks, vacations, etc, is somehow considered normal, but that should stop. Yes, it's nice to be on the receiving end of that, but it raises the costs for everyone.
For a company like Microsoft, which is a virtual monopoly, it's completely unnecessary. What is the Hungry government going to do, not buy Word and Excel licenses? I could understand the question if this were some small company trying to break into the market, but Microsoft?
Worst case, you don't go into that market. If bribes are required, don't go. Bribing your way in will just increase the cost of your product for everyone. And if your product is really that good, then the country that "requires" bribes will miss out and either change its ways or do without. If it really bugs you, document as best as possible the bribery of your competitors. If they are US based (or owned by a US company), turn them in for violations of FCPA. Or just explain the bribery to any shareholder/investor/reporter that asks about it. No one (at least in the US) is going to really say that the company should have resorted to bribery.
So no, there are no places where you "have" to bribe. There are alternatives -- they are just harder (and don't enrich your friends or relatives with company cash).
By the way, the court decided that the bakery thing wasn't a freedom of speech issue because no reasonable person would think that the message on the cake was the speech of the baker, but rather the speech of the couple.
Yet no reasonable person would think that a tweet from Alex Jones is the speech of Twitter, but rather the speech of Alex Jones. So, by that logic, Twitter shouldn't be allowed to "de-platform" him, right?
I personally barely know who Alex Jones is and have never watched/read/listened to him (I'm not even sure what his preferred medium is), but I am a fan of letting people open their mouths wide enough to stick their feet in. Often myself included :)
IANAL either, but my understanding is that insider information always exists. Using insider information to make stock purchases or sells is considered illegal. For example, if Musk knew he was going to tweet what he did and bought a bunch of Tesla right before that to make a bunch of money when the stock went up, that would be insider trading.
However, when the company (or an officer of the company) makes that information public, it is not really insider information any more. Twitter being very public, it would be hard to argue that Musk's tweet was insider information after the tweet.
So all that's left whether releasing that information is OK. There may be some rules I'm not aware of, but as long as the tweet was honest and made in good faith (i.e., not a lie or deception) there's nothing wrong. Consider a case where a pharmaceutical company makes a surprise announcement of a cure for some disease. That would probably make their stock go up, and short sellers wouldn't have any recourse. Why would they? They bet against the stock and they were wrong. Too bad. You gamble and you lost.
Maybe a bigger problem is that a stock's value swings wildly based on Twitter and not based on solid financial data. But that's a larger problem in the market, not specific to Tesla.
Good point, but hasn't that been Microsoft's modus operandi for many decades? It's not like partnering with Microsoft in the past has often ended up a good thing for the non-Microsoft partner. I suppose for Walmart, Microsoft is probably the lesser of two evils here, but it's still not a great choice.
There are all sorts of government laws that prevent peoples' FREEDOM to enter into (some) contracts. For example, you cannot sell yourself into slavery. You cannot enter into a contract to kill someone. And so on. Generally, these restrictions are regarded as good things for the larger society, even though it may negatively affect some sub group (like hitmen).
Your union contract is actually very similar to these non-complete clauses being discussed here. The worker didn't sign this contract, but is being affected by its consequences by being forced to join the union and pay union dues in order to take a job. While that sort of contract is good for the union, is it good for the workers affected by it or for society at large? You might think so, but consider that it has negatives as well. For example, competing unions that might offer lower dues (better efficiency) or want to negotiate a different employment package better suited to some employees. But under a monopoly agreement, those would not be possible.
With vertical space at a premium, you should look into the Tree Style Tab extension for Firefox. It puts your tabs down the side, and also organizes them in a tree structure, so that new tabs open under the tab they were opened from. You can collapse groups of tabs as needed. Personally, I don't know why all the major browsers keep tabs on the top. With widescreeen monitors (at least on desktops/laptops), tabs on the side makes much more sense.
Of course, I had to stay on FF56 to avoid losing my TST extension, though I think the latest version of FF re-enables some features to allow it to work properly again.
Do brick & mortar vendors near state lines need to start checking IDs so they can charge the right sales tax to each customer based on their home address? That's where they are "delivering" the items to, right?
In some places, there are very different tax rates on things like cigarettes, such that smokers have a strong incentive to drive across the state line to purchase cigarettes at a lower rate. States have gone after these smokers for violating their home states' tax laws by not paying the higher tax. With this ruling, will they go after the vendor instead?
Another example: I've often seen in tourist locations vendors offering to ship (especially large) items their customers buy so they don't have to try to pack it in their luggage. Will those vendors have to collect and remit sales taxes to tourists' home states?
In the real world, the tax that applies is always where the vendor is, not where the item will eventually end up. But for some reason, in the virtual Internet world, everyone thinks the opposite should be true. That is what doesn't make sense.
But I look forward to going into Walmarts in other states and demanding that they calculate tax based on my home state (and remit it there, too).
You're right that Congress should act and that it probably won't. But they don't have to do much. Simply create a law that says that any transaction that takes place where the seller and buyer are in different jurisdictions is governed by the taxing regulations of the seller. Then all the sellers on the Internet will have to collect sales tax, but only for one jurisdiction -- their own.
Yes, places like South Dakota will be upset because they probably have more buyers than sellers, but it's the solution that makes the most sense. It also follows real world analogies. For example, there is a shopping area near me that is a special taxing district that has a slightly higher sales tax rate to help pay for its development. They don't care that I'm going to "ship" anything I buy there somewhere that doesn't have that higher rate (my house). The transaction took place at the vendor's location, not where the item is shipped.
Just enshrine that in Federal law and be done with it.
What makes you think that when I order something from a website that the "transaction" is taking place where I am located? Why is it not based on where the vendor is located? Worse, places like Amazon charge sales tax based on where an item is shipped, which may not be a state where either I or Amazon is located!
Personally, I think website businesses should collect sales taxes based on the state where the business is incorporated. After all, customers "go" to a website to buy something. Our language implies the act of the customer travelling, at least virtually, to the place that the vendor is located to conduct the transaction.
Or if this ruling really enshrines the idea that where an item is to be used is where taxes should be paid, does that mean if I'm travelling, forget a charger, and buy a replacement from a local Best Buy, I can demand they charge my home state's sales tax and that they remit that money to my home state? After all, Best Buy does have stores in my home state, so it shouldn't be too much of a burden, right?
Where I live in Florida, fertilizer is considered a pollutant. This is because when it rains it collects in the waterways. There, it does its job by getting plant material to grow in the form of algae. These algae blooms can get so thick that they end up killing the animal life. Sometimes, the blooms are toxic to humans and create really bad smells.
The point is that fertilizer is not always good and concentrations from run-off can have unintended consequences.
Microsoft makes money from people running Windows. In license fees for Windows, and in license fees for Windows applications (which are built by developers running Windows). If people are running Ubuntu, they aren't running Windows, and not making money for Microsoft.
Further, there's "secure" boot to consider. Right now, it is optional. But if users can run Linux applications under Windows, then why do they need to run Linux kernel natively? And if they don't need to run the Linux kernel, then there's no reason for SecureBoot to allow it.
So look forward to a future where you won't be able to run the Linux kernel at all, and through that, have real trouble running a truly Free system. That's the end game for WSL.