Have you ever noticed that when you turn your phone on after it has been off all day, you receive texts that were sent hours earlier? That's because the carrier doesn't just send it out to you and hope that you got it, the phone acknowledges receiving the message. Until the message is acknowledged as received, the carrier keeps it to retry later.
Taking on student loans you can't afford and won't be able to afford is pretty silly, especially if you get a degree in Iranian History or Women's Studies at a private university for $60,000.
My Cisco CCNA cost me $400. ($300 for the exam, $100 for study materials, YouTube study videos free). The payback period from the salary increase was well less than a year. I've now quadrupled my income after earning six certifications.
My masters degree in computer science from Georgia Tech will cost $5,600. That's $7,000 tuition minus $1,400 tax credit.
In my family, we get training and education, not loans. You can do what you want.
> Off topic. Keeping ones skills up to date is not the same as getting ones initial education
Ones education in computer science is very likely done in either a teaching language or an outdated language. Stanford teaches C, C++, and assembly. What do you think is most important to your employability:
One guy has a 10% better understanding of the details of C. The other guy can do useful work in Python, C#, or Rust.
If the $50,000 to sit in class DID help students learn the class stuff better, it would hardly matter. What matters os whether they can get the job done using the tools and techniques the company uses today, and is moving toward in the future.
Do you by chance have $60,000 in student loans you need to justify?
The Georgia Tech online masters in computer science costs $7,000. Typical cost to sit in a lecture hall is about $50,000. That traditional method is going to have to be a whole lot better to make it worth costing seven times as much.
I've been around computer science, in software engineering, for 20 years. One thing I've learned is that to earn well over your career, you need to keep learning, keep your skills up to date. What you learned ten years ago in school isn't enough, in fact it's mostly just background education to make it easier to learn the tools and techniques you'll actually use in your job.
If you have a spare $50,000 or $60,000 you want to spend on sitting in a classroom rather than watching the lecture from home or from the library, you're more than welcome to spend your money that way. I won't be doing that.
> No one in Russia would be part of troll farm companies that are designed to influence opinions they had better alternatives for earning an income.
I note that Americans have better alternatives for earning and income, yet they are part of troll farms designed to influence opinions. See the trolling posted with every Slashdot story.:D
On a more serious note, you're right they HAVE been through really tough economic times hastened by the United States, in relatively recent memory. It that economic isolation caused the country to fail, the Soviet Union to dissolve. One would hope that some Russian leaders would learn from that and not seek to repeat it.
Let's congratulate them on this milestone. They are now at almost half the production rate of the Ford Model A. If they keep increasing production like this, they may become a major auto company in 85 years.
It has been said that when those who have a duty to act fail to do so, they have done harm through inaction.
An officer was convicted when he saw a mean being beaten outside a nightclub and failed to take appropriate action to stop it.
Five officers were convicted of manslaughter after they arrested a man who was being violent toward hospital staff. He was in the hospital to be treated for a head injury. Without proper treatment, he died.
That's a very interesting thought. I would suspect that swatting of this nature AND true calls that sound similar to swatting are both pretty infrequent. It might indeed be very useful to know the comparative frequency. That would give us the a priori probably that a given call is indeed factual.
I third category would be a crazy person claiming hostages that don't exist or otherwise misrepresenting a scenario that actually is dangerous, such as in a suicide by cop situation.
Let's walk through your "cordone off the block suggestion" and you tell me what you think the cops should exactly. I'm not sure there is such an easy solution that is appropriate both if the call is true and if it's completely false. Which isn't to excuse officers who screwed up; I just don't see a simple, easy solution that actually makes sense. Randomly choosing the Barriss example, they get a 911 call saying:
--
he shot his father in the head, his father wasn't breathing, he was holding his mother and little brother in a closet at gunpoint and he might soon set the house ablaze. --
So the available information indicates one victim will probably be dead in a few minutes if he doesn't get immediate medical attention. Two more victims are likely to be shot in the head within the next few minutes.
Since the perpetrator has already begun shooting people, he's likely to shoot at anyone who comes in the house.
It seems very difficult to me to come up with procedures that both make sense for handling a psycho who is already shooting people (if the call is true) and also make sense for a swatting call. The best I can come up to very quickly put an overwhelming force to arrest the alleged perpetrator, trying to arrest, not shoot, him. The cops know going in that the perpetrator may well try to kill them, so that's the reason for a fast overwhelming response, in order to arrest the guy before he kills a few officers. Given that the person seems to have states he's already shot one person and may kill more people, I'm not surprised that officers would be watching the person very closely and if it looks like he's raising a gun, or reaching for one, they react as if it's a lethal threat - because it probably is.
So anyway, back to your suggestion. You've got one victim bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head. The fun is pointed at two more victims. What do you do next after you cordone off the block?
It's also true that computer science and computer engineering people know how to scale things, through automation and other means. A very simple example is that a lot of courses in other fields still have quizzes and such grades by hand. Anyone with even half a clue about computer anything wouldn't generally do that. Open source software like Moodle provides very flexible quizzes which can adapt to the student. I'd rather watch a recorded lecture by one of the best in the field than a live lecture by just another guy.
We CAN have high-quality education in this field, more efficiently, which means lower costs to students. The OMSCS at Georgia Tech looks promising, for example.
We also have to remember that graduating school doesn't mean you stop learning. I study daily and I've been in the field professionally for 20 years. College should give us the background we need in order to build our knowledge in different areas, and the skills and interest to learn. If we expect to do an entire career worth of learning in 2-4 years we're going to be dissapointed every time.
It seems to me they did find the key. It was staring them right in the face, literally.
A lawful court order cannot compel a defendant to TESTIFY. It CAN compel someone to do things. It is common for an order to compel someone to turn over some evidence. If they have hidden it, or locked it up, "turn over" the evidence means get it from its hiding place, or unlock the safe it is in, or whatever is required in order to bring the evidence to the court.
That may not have been necessary in this case, as the FBI could hold the phone up to his face. The defendant only needed to be present, not say or do anything.
I found that if I have to plug in four different cables to dock I do so much less often than one cable. My keyboard and mouse are Bluetooth, so there are no cables - set the laptop on the desk and the mouse and keyboard are already ready to go.
Speaking of the new Code of Conduct, I notice this article says this is the third version and they are hoping this version will be good enough to make it into the kernel. The old CoC used to address that. The (very short) CoC said that your code probably will be sent back for revision, the first time and probably several times. Don't take it personally, that's part of quality for the world's most used kernel. Rarely does anyone get it just right on the first try, being completely up to the expected standards of the kernel. So don't take offense, just do the suggested improvements and submit again.
If someone wanted to go into detail about what it means to not be a jerk, fine. Even if you want to say it's extra bad to be a jerk to someone who happens to have whatever kind of genitalia, fine. I wish they hadn't removed the old wording about code reviews being about the code, it's not friggin personal. I had my code sent back probably five times, until eventually we found an all-around better way of doing it, along with getting the details just right. I'm pretty sure that had nothing to do with my genitalia or complexion since few people know what my complexion happens to be, and even fewer have seen my genitalia. They just know what I write about, and in my professional circle never written about the struggles of being X in America.
A couple times on Slashdot I've mentioned some particularly nasty and insidious racism targeting my family, but few Slashdot readers work on the projects I contribute to. Heck, even on Slashdot those who guess about my demographics mostly guess wrong, and therefore post some hilarious accusations. Apparently I hate my own family, according to one or two utter morons on here.
With these new codes of conduct that are popular lately, I find it odd that apparently I'm supposed to figure out the sexual proclivities of everyone, in order to know who to be extra sensitive to. I don't know the gender, race, or sexual interests of most of the people involved in projects I work on, because why would you even bring that up? It's irelevant. "Here's a patch to rsync to copy device files byte-byte. I'm a hairy male who enjoys other hairy males". Doesn't make any sense to me why that would be part of the software development process.
I always used my Magic Trackpad 2 with my desktop. Never used it with a MacBook. When I DO plug in my MacBook at my desk, I also use my preferred keyboard. Why use an external trackpad and not use whatever keyboard you want, Bluetooth or USB? I'd think that if one added another trackpad, they'd also add their preferred keyboard.
Which "most C-syntax languages" do you have in mind?
In C++, C#, Java, Perl, and most languages I can think of, assignment is an expression, which means it returns a value.
The sole exception I can think of is that in Rust there IS NO assignment for many kinds of values. In Rust what looks like an assignment:
A = B;
May actually destroy B, making it no longer accessible. The value is moved from B to A, not copied. There can be only one instance of most value types, there cannot be two variables with the value. For that reason in Rust you can't do: A = B = C;
That would (in any C derived language) result in A and B having the same value, which is often not supported in Rust.
Is Rust what you meant by "most languages"? Rust is weird in this respect (and a few other respects as well).
I've started preventing that by habitually putting the variable on the right side. If I accidentally use = instead of == I'll get a syntax error. It makes that bug impossible by just changing an arbitrary habit.
For most of my career I've founded and run companies, always companies doing something new and different. I didn't mind the risks involved, and I enjoyed trying to accomplish something that no other company had done. I was pretty good at starting companies but not as good at running them after they got going and were somewhat stable.
I think in some ways Musk is similar - as soon as he has one company up and going, even being *on its way* to having a saleable product, he goes off and starts another company. He likes starting companies, and he's good at it.
After one of my companies was up and going, making sales of a good product for several years, I realized I'm not great at running a business. Market strategy, strategies partnerships, etc aren't my thing. I probably should have sold the company, but again finding a buyer and negotiating the sale of a company isn't my thing I'm better at starting them, getting them off the ground. So one thing I looked into doing was getting people who ARE good at those, people who were running successful companies, and having them on my board. They'd meet maybe four times per year and have emails and phone calls throughout the year. If the board unanimously decided that something I as CEO wanted to do was stupid, they could override me. That might we'll have been good for me, to have a panel of successful business people having some oversight over my decisions and giving their opinions on major matters. It could be good for Musk as a stockholder too. He's good at thinking big and he's good at promotion, at getting media attention, but that doesn't mean all of his business decisions are the very best. Tempering him with independent board members could make his company more successful.
A thought just occurred to me. Musk thinks big, he really likes to do things on a huge scale. He's good at getting attention from the media and others. Guess who else is good at getting attention and likes to do everything yuge?:)
I notice the complaintant is talking about a bunch of different unrelated things. It's clear to me that he's mad, and he's mad at Apple, but he seems pretty unclear about what he is mad about.
In my experience, a pissed-off person who is whining about this and that and "they did this to me" and "they're assholes" and "they won't let me keep complaining about the products all the time" and on and on shouldn't be taken too seriously until they calm down and you figure out what exactly they are actually mad about.
To be precise, Windows 1-3.1 didn't come with networking. The "real" computers of the era ran network operating systems such as Unix. A DISK Operating System (DOS) , as opposed to a network operating system, for a PERSONAL computer (PC) was the oddball. Toys people played with at home ran Windows. It turned out to be a brilliant strategy as personal home computers developed into useful machines.
It worked really well for them from about 1988-1995. Then in 1995 the world wide web happened and an OS centered around the idea of only working locally eschewing the network-based model that preceded it suddenly was a big problem. Networking was back bigger than ever, and Microsoft had bet on DISK OS, rejecting the idea of the network. Microsoft execs were freaked out.
Worse, Microsoft had just spent years developing the next big thing, an extension of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) called COM. In any document, you could embed or link to some other file type. A Word document could link to a spreadsheet, or embed an image. It was amazing. It better be amazing - they had bet big on it.
Then they saw "a href" and "img src". Everything Microsoft had spent the last four years doing was suddenly replaced by a friggin tag.
Forshort time tried to stop the WWW from growing, but there was no way to stop it. Microsoft renamed COM (aka OLE) to "ActiveX" and tried to market it as an internet technology. We all know how well that went.
Yes, to encourage settlements they settle for less than they'd ask for in court. If they didn't, it would bw foolish for anyone to settle.
Also with these kinds of things it's useful to watch out for phrasing like "facing up to five years". In that phrase, five years is rhe maximum penalty allowed under the law. That doesn't mean the prosecution would ask for the max. That's just the max they could ask for.
In this instance, Musk clearly and publicly said finding was secured at $420, and that seems to be a lie. So guilt is pretty clear. On the other hand, he didn't sell a bunch of stock the day after the announcement or something like that, so that's definitely a mitigating factor. He was trying to get press, to get attention for his company, not pump and dump. So a medium sentence might be appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever noticed that when you turn your phone on after it has been off all day, you receive texts that were sent hours earlier? That's because the carrier doesn't just send it out to you and hope that you got it, the phone acknowledges receiving the message. Until the message is acknowledged as received, the carrier keeps it to retry later.
Taking on student loans you can't afford and won't be able to afford is pretty silly, especially if you get a degree in Iranian History or Women's Studies at a private university for $60,000.
My Cisco CCNA cost me $400. ($300 for the exam, $100 for study materials, YouTube study videos free). The payback period from the salary increase was well less than a year. I've now quadrupled my income after earning six certifications.
My masters degree in computer science from Georgia Tech will cost $5,600. That's $7,000 tuition minus $1,400 tax credit.
In my family, we get training and education, not loans. You can do what you want.
> Off topic. Keeping ones skills up to date is not the same as getting ones initial education
Ones education in computer science is very likely done in either a teaching language or an outdated language. Stanford teaches C, C++, and assembly. What do you think is most important to your employability:
One guy has a 10% better understanding of the details of C.
The other guy can do useful work in Python, C#, or Rust.
If the $50,000 to sit in class DID help students learn the class stuff better, it would hardly matter. What matters os whether they can get the job done using the tools and techniques the company uses today, and is moving toward in the future.
Do you by chance have $60,000 in student loans you need to justify?
BYD makes more EVs than Tesla does. Zhidou may also.
Tesla *is* the premiere supplier of luxury EVs in the United States.
The Georgia Tech online masters in computer science costs $7,000. Typical cost to sit in a lecture hall is about $50,000. That traditional method is going to have to be a whole lot better to make it worth costing seven times as much.
I've been around computer science, in software engineering, for 20 years. One thing I've learned is that to earn well over your career, you need to keep learning, keep your skills up to date. What you learned ten years ago in school isn't enough, in fact it's mostly just background education to make it easier to learn the tools and techniques you'll actually use in your job.
If you have a spare $50,000 or $60,000 you want to spend on sitting in a classroom rather than watching the lecture from home or from the library, you're more than welcome to spend your money that way. I won't be doing that.
> No one in Russia would be part of troll farm companies that are designed to influence opinions they had better alternatives for earning an income.
I note that Americans have better alternatives for earning and income, yet they are part of troll farms designed to influence opinions. See the trolling posted with every Slashdot story. :D
On a more serious note, you're right they HAVE been through really tough economic times hastened by the United States, in relatively recent memory. It that economic isolation caused the country to fail, the Soviet Union to dissolve. One would hope that some Russian leaders would learn from that and not seek to repeat it.
Let's congratulate them on this milestone. They are now at almost half the production rate of the Ford Model A. If they keep increasing production like this, they may become a major auto company in 85 years.
Thanks for that.
It has been said that when those who have a duty to act fail to do so, they have done harm through inaction.
An officer was convicted when he saw a mean being beaten outside a nightclub and failed to take appropriate action to stop it.
Five officers were convicted of manslaughter after they arrested a man who was being violent toward hospital staff. He was in the hospital to be treated for a head injury. Without proper treatment, he died.
That's a very interesting thought. I would suspect that swatting of this nature AND true calls that sound similar to swatting are both pretty infrequent. It might indeed be very useful to know the comparative frequency. That would give us the a priori probably that a given call is indeed factual.
I third category would be a crazy person claiming hostages that don't exist or otherwise misrepresenting a scenario that actually is dangerous, such as in a suicide by cop situation.
Let's walk through your "cordone off the block suggestion" and you tell me what you think the cops should exactly. I'm not sure there is such an easy solution that is appropriate both if the call is true and if it's completely false. Which isn't to excuse officers who screwed up; I just don't see a simple, easy solution that actually makes sense. Randomly choosing the Barriss example, they get a 911 call saying:
--
he shot his father in the head, his father wasn't breathing, he was holding his mother and little brother in a closet at gunpoint and he might soon set the house ablaze.
--
So the available information indicates one victim will probably be dead in a few minutes if he doesn't get immediate medical attention. Two more victims are likely to be shot in the head within the next few minutes.
Since the perpetrator has already begun shooting people, he's likely to shoot at anyone who comes in the house.
It seems very difficult to me to come up with procedures that both make sense for handling a psycho who is already shooting people (if the call is true) and also make sense for a swatting call. The best I can come up to very quickly put an overwhelming force to arrest the alleged perpetrator, trying to arrest, not shoot, him. The cops know going in that the perpetrator may well try to kill them, so that's the reason for a fast overwhelming response, in order to arrest the guy before he kills a few officers. Given that the person seems to have states he's already shot one person and may kill more people, I'm not surprised that officers would be watching the person very closely and if it looks like he's raising a gun, or reaching for one, they react as if it's a lethal threat - because it probably is.
So anyway, back to your suggestion. You've got one victim bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head. The fun is pointed at two more victims. What do you do next after you cordone off the block?
That's true.
It's also true that computer science and computer engineering people know how to scale things, through automation and other means. A very simple example is that a lot of courses in other fields still have quizzes and such grades by hand. Anyone with even half a clue about computer anything wouldn't generally do that. Open source software like Moodle provides very flexible quizzes which can adapt to the student. I'd rather watch a recorded lecture by one of the best in the field than a live lecture by just another guy.
We CAN have high-quality education in this field, more efficiently, which means lower costs to students. The OMSCS at Georgia Tech looks promising, for example.
We also have to remember that graduating school doesn't mean you stop learning. I study daily and I've been in the field professionally for 20 years. College should give us the background we need in order to build our knowledge in different areas, and the skills and interest to learn. If we expect to do an entire career worth of learning in 2-4 years we're going to be dissapointed every time.
> it is up to the FBI to find their own key,
It seems to me they did find the key. It was staring them right in the face, literally.
A lawful court order cannot compel a defendant to TESTIFY. It CAN compel someone to do things. It is common for an order to compel someone to turn over some evidence. If they have hidden it, or locked it up, "turn over" the evidence means get it from its hiding place, or unlock the safe it is in, or whatever is required in order to bring the evidence to the court.
That may not have been necessary in this case, as the FBI could hold the phone up to his face. The defendant only needed to be present, not say or do anything.
People miss jokes, but that's pretty I'm impressive that you missed the fact it was a joke even when I explicitly said I'm kidding.
Rather than a pronoun, you can call me:
Teacher
Master
Sensei
Coach
Professor
Any of those will do. :D
I kid, but recently I've been called Sensei, and I kinda like it. I *do* take on the role. At least, I'm a senpai. I wouldn't claim to be dai-sensei.
I found that if I have to plug in four different cables to dock I do so much less often than one cable. My keyboard and mouse are Bluetooth, so there are no cables - set the laptop on the desk and the mouse and keyboard are already ready to go.
Speaking of the new Code of Conduct, I notice this article says this is the third version and they are hoping this version will be good enough to make it into the kernel. The old CoC used to address that. The (very short) CoC said that your code probably will be sent back for revision, the first time and probably several times. Don't take it personally, that's part of quality for the world's most used kernel. Rarely does anyone get it just right on the first try, being completely up to the expected standards of the kernel. So don't take offense, just do the suggested improvements and submit again.
If someone wanted to go into detail about what it means to not be a jerk, fine. Even if you want to say it's extra bad to be a jerk to someone who happens to have whatever kind of genitalia, fine. I wish they hadn't removed the old wording about code reviews being about the code, it's not friggin personal. I had my code sent back probably five times, until eventually we found an all-around better way of doing it, along with getting the details just right. I'm pretty sure that had nothing to do with my genitalia or complexion since few people know what my complexion happens to be, and even fewer have seen my genitalia. They just know what I write about, and in my professional circle never written about the struggles of being X in America.
A couple times on Slashdot I've mentioned some particularly nasty and insidious racism targeting my family, but few Slashdot readers work on the projects I contribute to. Heck, even on Slashdot those who guess about my demographics mostly guess wrong, and therefore post some hilarious accusations. Apparently I hate my own family, according to one or two utter morons on here.
With these new codes of conduct that are popular lately, I find it odd that apparently I'm supposed to figure out the sexual proclivities of everyone, in order to know who to be extra sensitive to. I don't know the gender, race, or sexual interests of most of the people involved in projects I work on, because why would you even bring that up? It's irelevant. "Here's a patch to rsync to copy device files byte-byte. I'm a hairy male who enjoys other hairy males". Doesn't make any sense to me why that would be part of the software development process.
I always used my Magic Trackpad 2 with my desktop. Never used it with a MacBook. When I DO plug in my MacBook at my desk, I also use my preferred keyboard. Why use an external trackpad and not use whatever keyboard you want, Bluetooth or USB? I'd think that if one added another trackpad, they'd also add their preferred keyboard.
Which "most C-syntax languages" do you have in mind?
In C++, C#, Java, Perl, and most languages I can think of, assignment is an expression, which means it returns a value.
The sole exception I can think of is that in Rust there IS NO assignment for many kinds of values. In Rust what looks like an assignment:
A = B;
May actually destroy B, making it no longer accessible. The value is moved from B to A, not copied. There can be only one instance of most value types, there cannot be two variables with the value. For that reason in Rust you can't do:
A = B = C;
That would (in any C derived language) result in A and B having the same value, which is often not supported in Rust.
Is Rust what you meant by "most languages"? Rust is weird in this respect (and a few other respects as well).
I've started preventing that by habitually putting the variable on the right side. If I accidentally use = instead of == I'll get a syntax error. It makes that bug impossible by just changing an arbitrary habit.
if ( 10 == variable )
I've started preventing that by habitually putting the variable on the right side. If I accidentally use = instead of == I'll get a syntax error.
For most of my career I've founded and run companies, always companies doing something new and different. I didn't mind the risks involved, and I enjoyed trying to accomplish something that no other company had done. I was pretty good at starting companies but not as good at running them after they got going and were somewhat stable.
I think in some ways Musk is similar - as soon as he has one company up and going, even being *on its way* to having a saleable product, he goes off and starts another company. He likes starting companies, and he's good at it.
After one of my companies was up and going, making sales of a good product for several years, I realized I'm not great at running a business. Market strategy, strategies partnerships, etc aren't my thing. I probably should have sold the company, but again finding a buyer and negotiating the sale of a company isn't my thing I'm better at starting them, getting them off the ground. So one thing I looked into doing was getting people who ARE good at those, people who were running successful companies, and having them on my board. They'd meet maybe four times per year and have emails and phone calls throughout the year. If the board unanimously decided that something I as CEO wanted to do was stupid, they could override me. That might we'll have been good for me, to have a panel of successful business people having some oversight over my decisions and giving their opinions on major matters. It could be good for Musk as a stockholder too. He's good at thinking big and he's good at promotion, at getting media attention, but that doesn't mean all of his business decisions are the very best. Tempering him with independent board members could make his company more successful.
A thought just occurred to me. Musk thinks big, he really likes to do things on a huge scale. He's good at getting attention from the media and others. Guess who else is good at getting attention and likes to do everything yuge? :)
> What's popular isn't necessarily good.
Exactly. The most popular food brand in the world is probably McDonald's, certainly it's the most popular burger.
If that's not convincing enough, half the United States likes that other political party, and we all know how awful that party is.
I notice the complaintant is talking about a bunch of different unrelated things. It's clear to me that he's mad, and he's mad at Apple, but he seems pretty unclear about what he is mad about.
In my experience, a pissed-off person who is whining about this and that and "they did this to me" and "they're assholes" and "they won't let me keep complaining about the products all the time" and on and on shouldn't be taken too seriously until they calm down and you figure out what exactly they are actually mad about.
To be precise, Windows 1-3.1 didn't come with networking. The "real" computers of the era ran network operating systems such as Unix. A DISK Operating System (DOS) , as opposed to a network operating system, for a PERSONAL computer (PC) was the oddball. Toys people played with at home ran Windows. It turned out to be a brilliant strategy as personal home computers developed into useful machines.
It worked really well for them from about 1988-1995. Then in 1995 the world wide web happened and an OS centered around the idea of only working locally eschewing the network-based model that preceded it suddenly was a big problem. Networking was back bigger than ever, and Microsoft had bet on DISK OS, rejecting the idea of the network. Microsoft execs were freaked out.
Worse, Microsoft had just spent years developing the next big thing, an extension of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) called COM. In any document, you could embed or link to some other file type. A Word document could link to a spreadsheet, or embed an image. It was amazing. It better be amazing - they had bet big on it.
Then they saw "a href" and "img src". Everything Microsoft had spent the last four years doing was suddenly replaced by a friggin tag.
Forshort time tried to stop the WWW from growing, but there was no way to stop it. Microsoft renamed COM (aka OLE) to "ActiveX" and tried to market it as an internet technology. We all know how well that went.
Yes, to encourage settlements they settle for less than they'd ask for in court. If they didn't, it would bw foolish for anyone to settle.
Also with these kinds of things it's useful to watch out for phrasing like "facing up to five years". In that phrase, five years is rhe maximum penalty allowed under the law. That doesn't mean the prosecution would ask for the max. That's just the max they could ask for.
In this instance, Musk clearly and publicly said finding was secured at $420, and that seems to be a lie. So guilt is pretty clear. On the other hand, he didn't sell a bunch of stock the day after the announcement or something like that, so that's definitely a mitigating factor. He was trying to get press, to get attention for his company, not pump and dump. So a medium sentence might be appropriate.