In a nutshell, Prop 13 artificially lowers property tax to an insane degree, and keeps it artificially low until that property changes hands via sale. What this means in practice is that if you own property in California, you don't want to sell it because until you do it is taxed at a way lower rate than it should be. This means lots of people hold on to their property, which raises the value of property overall. In turn, those who hold on to their property now find their property values skyrocketing because demand is nowhere near supply, and all of their personal wealth gets tied up in said property value. So for them to keep that wealth, the best thing is for as little property as possible to enter the market, to keep their values high. Hence, the NIMBYism you see rampant across California, particularly in SF, LA, SJ, etc.
Barring Prop 13's repeal or a complete collapse of the California economy triggering a wave of panic sellers, property value will continue to inflate as more people and businesses want to operate here but less and less people are willing to sell.
My options were to either leave the Bay, or find a job that paid six figures. Thankfully I was able to find the latter. Unfortunately around these parts you have to follow the money - not your passions - unless you're willing to skimp to an insane degree.
"The FCC doesn't have the authority to enforce net neutrality, so we will repeal our rules. Also the FCC DOES have the authority to interfere with states rights and preempt them from enforcing net neutrality on their own."
What a fucking joke. Pai is the transparent corporate stooge we all thought Wheeler would be.
Corporations haven't been accountable for anything in this country for years, because those in power (yes, Democrats AND Republicans) are in their pockets. If you want to see what happens when Government actually tries to strike back at corporations with these assholes in power, look no further than the CFPB, which has had its power castrated and is currently in the process of being de facto dismantled because it ruffled too many powerful feathers by actually punishing a company (Wells Fargo) for breaking the law.
What would have been news is if Equifax or its top brass received any actual meaningful punishment.
The FCC's rollback of Net Neutrality rules was ostensibly predicated on the premise that the FCC "doesn't have the authority" to enforce Net Neutrality. If that's the stance the FCC wants to take that's fine, but they then can't turn around and say they do have the authority to preempt states from adopting their own Net Neutrality measures. You can't have it both ways. Things would be different if Congress had passed a preemption, but as it stands I think the FCC would have a very hard time winning this fight in court given their contradictory statements on their ability to adjudicate how ISP's handle delivery of data.
It's not just a stealth layoff, it's stealth ageism. I'd wager that much of IBM's older, higher salaried workforce is participating in the remote program, while the workers who are already in the urban centers around the offices or are willing to uproot their lives to move to one are younger and cheaper.
Take the exact same case, but replace the phone with a safe, and the PIN with the combination to the safe's lock. In this instance, the 5th Amendment absolutely protects from being compelled to unlock the safe or provide the combination to open the lock. Now having said that if the police have a warrant for the contents of the safe because there is reasonable suspicion evidence pertaining to the investigation is contained within, they are absolutely free to seize the safe and attempt to open it via other means (locksmith/physically cutting/breaking the safe open/etc). In the same manner, if the police have a warrant for the contents of the phone's memory in this case, they are within their rights to attempt to guess the PIN or break the encryption on the phone. You could argue that's much harder than breaking into a physical safe - and that is usually the case - but frankly that's not the defendant's problem. Just because it's hard for the police to obtain potentially incriminating evidence does not compel one to surrender it. This is a flagrant violation of the 5th Amendment, and I cannot believe courts continue to skirt such a fundamental part of our legal system because police are throwing a fit about encryption being unfair.
Is that landlords have access to bidders personal information, and that the landlord gets to "choose" among the bidders who actually gets to rent the property, regardless of their offers. The article compares the service to ebay, but a key difference is that on ebay the highest bidder always gets the item, provided they can actually pay up. By putting that power instead in the hands of the landlords, the company is really shooting themselves in the foot. Some landlord somewhere will eventually turn down a higher bid from a black/latino/etc potential tenant in favor of a white one, or a male tenant instead of a female one or vice versa, etc etc. Then both the landlord and the company will be buried up to their eyeballs in litigation from every conceivable direction.
If Pai is truly a believer in free market and competition, then don't stop at just knocking down net neutrality. Remove the regional monopolies that restrict where existing ISP's can and cannot do business. Remove roadblocks to cities building municipal fiber, since this only creates more competition so long as they're on a level playing field with private ISP's. Lift restrictions on last mile unbundling so that more companies can enter the market and offer competing services.
The fact is net neutrality was such a necessity only because there are few players in the market and limited choice for consumers. Who cares if ISP's can create fast lanes and throttle non-partnered content if I have a list of 20 ISP's with broadband speeds to choose from, since there will always be those whose model is to offer a more open package, even if it is at a higher price. The ISP's are crying about regulation, but only when it's regulations on what they can do. Once you talk about remove regulations on what their competitors can do, suddenly these restrictions need to be upheld. Because if you gave the average Comcast customer the option to choose another ISP with better customer service, no data caps, and more transparent billing practices they'd take it in a heartbeat, even if meant an increase in monthly price.
If Pai truly walks his talk and heavily deregulates the industry by removing barriers to entry and regional monopolies in addition to net neutrality, he'll be a far better FCC Commissioner than Wheeler ever was. If however he's yet another industry talking head who's only interested in removing consumer protections while still leaving in place industry friendly regulation, then nothing good will come from his chairmanship.
Is that Apple had no interest in actually sending the logs and test data to their engineers to figure out what went wrong and develop a solution. Instead, they wanted to solve the issue with PR: insist that CR somehow ran incorrect or non-stringent testing, have them re-run the tests according to how Apple wants them to be run, and have them revise their recommendation. Obviously I'm extrapolating a bit here, but it feels consistent with Apple's action up till now. Not to mention they put their head of marketing on the case, not any actual engineers.
Good on Consumer Reports for sticking to their standards instead of caving to pressure.
While I imagine I'll have to bite the bullet on my sole Win 10 machine eventually and download the anniversary edition, I intentionally set it to "Metered Connection" for exactly this reason. I like to let major updates hit and assess the impact for a few days before taking the plunge, and currently telling Windows you're on a metered connection is the only way to get it to not automatically download updates. Looks like I'll be waiting a bit longer than I thought - would not appreciate my Linux partition going up in smoke.
How about "get fucked."
No job is worth having to suffer somebody who feels they have the right to exercise that kind of absolute authority over you. Even if there weren't dozens of other tech companies in the bay area ready to gobble up talent - and there are - that would be immediate cause for walking, no question.
Because they can get more money in damages from a tech company than they can from some idiot Georgia teen and her family. If the kid who crashed into them were a multi-millionaire, Snapchat's involvement would have never even been a talking point. They are making a fringe case of negligence that will be difficult to prove, simply because it's the option that offers the possibility of highest financial gain.
I'm sure they were thinking the feature would be "innovative", and not about the possible dangers. Why do your due diligence on new feature implementation when all the engineers in the room agree that it sounds really, really cool?
Why limit it to just millennials? A 50 year old person texting behind the wheel is just as dangerous as a 16 year old texting behind the wheel, and you're lying through your teeth if you tell me you haven't seen idiots of all ages glued to their phones instead of the road while driving.
Focusing in on stereotyping one generational group instead of actually trying to address the problem generally fails to get anything of merit accomplished.
I don't feel like I've read a news article. I feel like I've read some undergrad's persuasive argument essay on why this movie isn't covered by copyright.
What happened to giving readers objective facts about a newsworthy scenario, and allowing them to make their own judgements and come to their own conclusions? Hell, this isn't even an example of giving all the facts and then making the decision for us: the article spends so much time railing against the movie being protected from copyright that I don't feel as though I have a clear picture of what's actually going on. What an awful goddamn article, why was it put up here?
Actually AviSynth does have a (very basic) UI: AvsPmod It's not the fanciest thing in the world, but it does the job. You're still writing scripts, but it comes with some nice options like error reporting and previewing, which make life a lot easier.
But as far as I'm aware there's still another platform that offers far higher technical capability, zero DRM, much more flexibility as a media center if that's your thing, and can even be upgraded when parts break or become obsolete. Call me back when the PS4 gets all that, too.
Maybe before we rush to adopt the Metric system, we should stop to consider the consequences of blithely giving this measurement system such a central position in our lives.
Both of them are hungry for all the personal data they can get their hands on, so that they can turn around and sell anything to you, and sell you to anything. The problem is that while I'm completely in control of my choice to have a Facebook account (read: I don't have a facebook account), my most recent employer requires me to have a LinkedIn profile. Moreover, a lot of tech firms won't even consider you if they can't find you on LinkedIn. It's a horrible site, but unfortunately everybody expects you to play the game.
better-than-expected (non-GAAP) earnings of $420 million, or 38 cents per share.
Oh, so it's cool to treat non GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) as hard facts now? Awesome, then I'm declaring $5 billion in earnings this day alone. See? I wrote $5 billion on this post-it note, so it must be true!
I'll wait until Yahoo releases the numbers that came from actual accounting work, and not the CEO playing around in excel.
I applaud the change itself, but stretching the timeframe to actually having a good system implemented will do Microsoft no good. I hope they're okay with rampant piracy, since it will be more convenient to just pirate a new copy of Office 2013, rather than fumble around with Microsoft's customer support for a day while they double check my name, phone number, social security number, hair color, and genome sequence to make absolutely sure I really am the same one who bought that license in the first place.
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It all comes down to one problem: Proposition 13.
In a nutshell, Prop 13 artificially lowers property tax to an insane degree, and keeps it artificially low until that property changes hands via sale. What this means in practice is that if you own property in California, you don't want to sell it because until you do it is taxed at a way lower rate than it should be. This means lots of people hold on to their property, which raises the value of property overall. In turn, those who hold on to their property now find their property values skyrocketing because demand is nowhere near supply, and all of their personal wealth gets tied up in said property value. So for them to keep that wealth, the best thing is for as little property as possible to enter the market, to keep their values high. Hence, the NIMBYism you see rampant across California, particularly in SF, LA, SJ, etc.
Barring Prop 13's repeal or a complete collapse of the California economy triggering a wave of panic sellers, property value will continue to inflate as more people and businesses want to operate here but less and less people are willing to sell.
My options were to either leave the Bay, or find a job that paid six figures. Thankfully I was able to find the latter. Unfortunately around these parts you have to follow the money - not your passions - unless you're willing to skimp to an insane degree.
"The FCC doesn't have the authority to enforce net neutrality, so we will repeal our rules. Also the FCC DOES have the authority to interfere with states rights and preempt them from enforcing net neutrality on their own."
What a fucking joke. Pai is the transparent corporate stooge we all thought Wheeler would be.
Corporations haven't been accountable for anything in this country for years, because those in power (yes, Democrats AND Republicans) are in their pockets. If you want to see what happens when Government actually tries to strike back at corporations with these assholes in power, look no further than the CFPB, which has had its power castrated and is currently in the process of being de facto dismantled because it ruffled too many powerful feathers by actually punishing a company (Wells Fargo) for breaking the law.
What would have been news is if Equifax or its top brass received any actual meaningful punishment.
Please pay no attention to the dystopia behind the curtain!
The FCC's rollback of Net Neutrality rules was ostensibly predicated on the premise that the FCC "doesn't have the authority" to enforce Net Neutrality. If that's the stance the FCC wants to take that's fine, but they then can't turn around and say they do have the authority to preempt states from adopting their own Net Neutrality measures. You can't have it both ways. Things would be different if Congress had passed a preemption, but as it stands I think the FCC would have a very hard time winning this fight in court given their contradictory statements on their ability to adjudicate how ISP's handle delivery of data.
It's not just a stealth layoff, it's stealth ageism. I'd wager that much of IBM's older, higher salaried workforce is participating in the remote program, while the workers who are already in the urban centers around the offices or are willing to uproot their lives to move to one are younger and cheaper.
Take the exact same case, but replace the phone with a safe, and the PIN with the combination to the safe's lock. In this instance, the 5th Amendment absolutely protects from being compelled to unlock the safe or provide the combination to open the lock. Now having said that if the police have a warrant for the contents of the safe because there is reasonable suspicion evidence pertaining to the investigation is contained within, they are absolutely free to seize the safe and attempt to open it via other means (locksmith/physically cutting/breaking the safe open/etc). In the same manner, if the police have a warrant for the contents of the phone's memory in this case, they are within their rights to attempt to guess the PIN or break the encryption on the phone. You could argue that's much harder than breaking into a physical safe - and that is usually the case - but frankly that's not the defendant's problem. Just because it's hard for the police to obtain potentially incriminating evidence does not compel one to surrender it. This is a flagrant violation of the 5th Amendment, and I cannot believe courts continue to skirt such a fundamental part of our legal system because police are throwing a fit about encryption being unfair.
Is that landlords have access to bidders personal information, and that the landlord gets to "choose" among the bidders who actually gets to rent the property, regardless of their offers. The article compares the service to ebay, but a key difference is that on ebay the highest bidder always gets the item, provided they can actually pay up. By putting that power instead in the hands of the landlords, the company is really shooting themselves in the foot. Some landlord somewhere will eventually turn down a higher bid from a black/latino/etc potential tenant in favor of a white one, or a male tenant instead of a female one or vice versa, etc etc. Then both the landlord and the company will be buried up to their eyeballs in litigation from every conceivable direction.
If Pai is truly a believer in free market and competition, then don't stop at just knocking down net neutrality. Remove the regional monopolies that restrict where existing ISP's can and cannot do business. Remove roadblocks to cities building municipal fiber, since this only creates more competition so long as they're on a level playing field with private ISP's. Lift restrictions on last mile unbundling so that more companies can enter the market and offer competing services.
The fact is net neutrality was such a necessity only because there are few players in the market and limited choice for consumers. Who cares if ISP's can create fast lanes and throttle non-partnered content if I have a list of 20 ISP's with broadband speeds to choose from, since there will always be those whose model is to offer a more open package, even if it is at a higher price. The ISP's are crying about regulation, but only when it's regulations on what they can do. Once you talk about remove regulations on what their competitors can do, suddenly these restrictions need to be upheld. Because if you gave the average Comcast customer the option to choose another ISP with better customer service, no data caps, and more transparent billing practices they'd take it in a heartbeat, even if meant an increase in monthly price.
If Pai truly walks his talk and heavily deregulates the industry by removing barriers to entry and regional monopolies in addition to net neutrality, he'll be a far better FCC Commissioner than Wheeler ever was. If however he's yet another industry talking head who's only interested in removing consumer protections while still leaving in place industry friendly regulation, then nothing good will come from his chairmanship.
Is that Apple had no interest in actually sending the logs and test data to their engineers to figure out what went wrong and develop a solution. Instead, they wanted to solve the issue with PR: insist that CR somehow ran incorrect or non-stringent testing, have them re-run the tests according to how Apple wants them to be run, and have them revise their recommendation. Obviously I'm extrapolating a bit here, but it feels consistent with Apple's action up till now. Not to mention they put their head of marketing on the case, not any actual engineers. Good on Consumer Reports for sticking to their standards instead of caving to pressure.
While I imagine I'll have to bite the bullet on my sole Win 10 machine eventually and download the anniversary edition, I intentionally set it to "Metered Connection" for exactly this reason. I like to let major updates hit and assess the impact for a few days before taking the plunge, and currently telling Windows you're on a metered connection is the only way to get it to not automatically download updates. Looks like I'll be waiting a bit longer than I thought - would not appreciate my Linux partition going up in smoke.
How about "get fucked." No job is worth having to suffer somebody who feels they have the right to exercise that kind of absolute authority over you. Even if there weren't dozens of other tech companies in the bay area ready to gobble up talent - and there are - that would be immediate cause for walking, no question.
Because they can get more money in damages from a tech company than they can from some idiot Georgia teen and her family. If the kid who crashed into them were a multi-millionaire, Snapchat's involvement would have never even been a talking point. They are making a fringe case of negligence that will be difficult to prove, simply because it's the option that offers the possibility of highest financial gain.
I'm sure they were thinking the feature would be "innovative", and not about the possible dangers. Why do your due diligence on new feature implementation when all the engineers in the room agree that it sounds really, really cool?
Why limit it to just millennials? A 50 year old person texting behind the wheel is just as dangerous as a 16 year old texting behind the wheel, and you're lying through your teeth if you tell me you haven't seen idiots of all ages glued to their phones instead of the road while driving. Focusing in on stereotyping one generational group instead of actually trying to address the problem generally fails to get anything of merit accomplished.
I don't feel like I've read a news article. I feel like I've read some undergrad's persuasive argument essay on why this movie isn't covered by copyright. What happened to giving readers objective facts about a newsworthy scenario, and allowing them to make their own judgements and come to their own conclusions? Hell, this isn't even an example of giving all the facts and then making the decision for us: the article spends so much time railing against the movie being protected from copyright that I don't feel as though I have a clear picture of what's actually going on. What an awful goddamn article, why was it put up here?
Actually AviSynth does have a (very basic) UI: AvsPmod It's not the fanciest thing in the world, but it does the job. You're still writing scripts, but it comes with some nice options like error reporting and previewing, which make life a lot easier.
Or are they also doing HDCP just to make sure that if you want to record footage, you need to pony up the cash?
Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder.
But as far as I'm aware there's still another platform that offers far higher technical capability, zero DRM, much more flexibility as a media center if that's your thing, and can even be upgraded when parts break or become obsolete. Call me back when the PS4 gets all that, too.
Maybe before we rush to adopt the Metric system, we should stop to consider the consequences of blithely giving this measurement system such a central position in our lives.
Both of them are hungry for all the personal data they can get their hands on, so that they can turn around and sell anything to you, and sell you to anything. The problem is that while I'm completely in control of my choice to have a Facebook account (read: I don't have a facebook account), my most recent employer requires me to have a LinkedIn profile. Moreover, a lot of tech firms won't even consider you if they can't find you on LinkedIn. It's a horrible site, but unfortunately everybody expects you to play the game.
better-than-expected (non-GAAP) earnings of $420 million, or 38 cents per share.
Oh, so it's cool to treat non GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) as hard facts now? Awesome, then I'm declaring $5 billion in earnings this day alone. See? I wrote $5 billion on this post-it note, so it must be true! I'll wait until Yahoo releases the numbers that came from actual accounting work, and not the CEO playing around in excel.
I applaud the change itself, but stretching the timeframe to actually having a good system implemented will do Microsoft no good. I hope they're okay with rampant piracy, since it will be more convenient to just pirate a new copy of Office 2013, rather than fumble around with Microsoft's customer support for a day while they double check my name, phone number, social security number, hair color, and genome sequence to make absolutely sure I really am the same one who bought that license in the first place.