Even at my relatively southerly latitude (49 degrees north) summers are light regardless of our nominal time zone. Winters are dark, again, regardless of our time zone. If we stayed on PST (UTC-8) all year the sun would set at 2030 in the summer. What more do people want? And on PDT all year (UTC-7) the sun would still set at 1700 in December. What good is that? It wouldn't rise until 0900. Ugh.
This. A million times this. Though it does depend a bit on where you are in the time zone on the exact sunrise/set times (not counting shenanigans on the time zone boundaries, it varies by an hour, unsurprisingly). Still, it doesn't change the fact that if you're at a high enough latitude or close enough to the equator, the benefits of DST are, well, dubious at best.
On another note, the idea of using DST all year is really just a way to get people to shift their day by an hour without them realizing it. That may have some benefit outside of the typical DST effective dates depending on latitude, though probably not so much during the shortest days of the year.
(Also, the link between time changes and heart attacks is tenuous at best. Sure, the additional stress from changing one's sleep schedule might, maybe, serve to cause a heart attack to trigger earlier than it might have, but it's not at all clear that such attacks wouldn't happen anyway a few days or weeks later. Even if there is a real link, typical dumbass shift rotations would be a much larger problem since the time change is twice a year but most dumbass shift rotations are changing shifts every couple of weeks at best and multiple times per week at worst.)
It's not really surprising, but so many of these "profanity" and "spam" filters just compare a list of "words" against the input using a naïve substring match with no concern for even word boundaries. I mean, just because you might think "tart" is offensive, I highly doubt you would think "start" is. (If you do, then you are the one with the problem.)
As far as I can tell, this sort of thing is usually motivated by the "ZOMG!!!1111!!!!11!!!!11!!1 Think of the children!!!!!!111!!1!!!1!!" types in management or management caving to those types. And, of course, the developers are given three microseconds to implement an impossible filter that will Protect The Children. Sometimes management even comes along with a list of Bad Words. Even if that isn't the case, the developers are going to look at the request, realize how impossible it is, and do the simplest thing that they can that will convince management that their system can now Protect The Children.
This is, of course, a subset of a more general problem of incorrect validation of input. The number of times I've had my perfectly valid email address rejected because there is a hyphen in the domain name, or worse, because it doesn't end in ".com", ".org", or ".net" (yes, that happened a couple of times, though not recently) is astounding. I even had my perfectly valid postal address rejected by a validation tool run by the national post office once.
That's one of the problems with a UBI scheme. Figuring out what that benchmark should be is hard. The idea is that the UBI should give people the ability to subsist without having to move across an international border (because that's difficult or impossible for many people) as long as they're careful with their money. However, that doesn't mean they should be able to subsist anywhere they choose. Just that they can if the are sensible and don't insist on living somewhere too expensive or have luxuries they can't afford. Exactly what that benchmark should be depends on the country in question. (And it really should only apply to citizens (or equivalent) of that country and probably not be offered to citizens living abroad.)
That sort of problem is one of the reasons I don't necessarily support such a scheme (as I said in my original post). I just don't see any variant of today's world that is likely to occur in the foreseeable future where this type of system could work. (There are other issues than figuring out what the basic income should be that make it questionable, and not all of them are with the idea of UBI itself.)
I don't think Toronto or Vancouver have a nicer standard of living. I was using them as an example of expensive markets which should not be used as a factor in detemrining what level a UBI should be set at. I'll stick with the city I live in which is much more livable.
I didn't actually say Toronto or Vancouver is a "nicer standard of living" though I can see how you inferred that from what I wrote. I could have been clearer but we can't expect perfect prose from random commenters on/., now, can we?
Let me prefix this by saying that I don't necessarily support implementing a UBI system. However, I have yet to see anything called a "basic income" or "universal basic incomie" pilot program actually do things at all correctly. As other commenters have suggested, these pilot programs seem to be designed so that they must necessarily fail and be examples the politicians can point at and say, "See? We tried it and it failed." I'm not convinced UBI can actually work, but it definitely won't work if it isn't done right.
To do UBI correctly, it has to go to everybody. And it has to *replace* any income support programs. That is, it has to replace government programs such as (un)employment insurance, government pension plans not funded completely and directly by member contributions (because everyone would get UBI, the pension plan wouldn't be required, would it?). There also can't be any clawback because someone earned some money outside of the program. Doing that just adds administrative cost to the program and discourages recipients from working. Also, every person should get the same amount regardless of age, marital status, etc., though maybe with a minimum age before it kicks in. Otherwise, you recreate existing complex administration processes.
Now, here's the absolutely critical component. This UBI must not be set at a level where the recipient can afford a car, nice television, nice house, 127 cats, and the like. It should provide for *healthy* subsistence in a reasonable market and require careful management of money to do so (which encourages those who won't work to move out of the expensive cities like Vancouver or Toronto and those who want a nicer standard of living to work). It needs to be set such that if you want a nice living, you have to earn additional money, on which you pay taxes. (Also, under a proper UBI system, only the UBI itself would be income tax exempt. There would be no need for low end tax brackets under such a system.)
Limited pilot programs just aren't going to demonstrate anything because they're not going to work exclusive of existing income support programs and are going to potentially unbalance the labour force because the people getting free money can work for less. (That's probably why the clawback had to be there in this case.) To truly demonstrate whether such a system can work, it has to be tried at a fairly large scale and *existing* income support programs must be suspended for anyone participating in such a test.
Now I do understand that there is always going to be someone who isn't well served by such a program. But that's true of all the current options, too. If you're going to insist that it has to be perfect for everyone, then are you willing to give up all the existing social programs that you currently benefit from on that same principle? I thought not. So let's not create strawmen out of extreme edge cases since *every* system has those.
I left my previous job (about 2 decades ago) because my employer at the time was slowly going under. As soon as they even suggested that payroll would be late one month, I started looking. They even tried to stiff me on my final paycheck by saying "you didn't work those last two days of the month" (it was a weekend and not normal work days) so I think I got out just in time. They did hold on for another year or so but eventually tanked and their assets were bought out by another company that tanked a few years later itself. Within a few years, my take home had close to doubled (to within the industry average at the time once you exclude the unreasonable outliers that skewed the average substantially upward).
My current job probably won't last until I retire (because reasons that make sense), but the past couple decades have been far better than the 18 months at the previous job.
Ahh, yes. The good old "force bill". Basically the card issuers being complicity in fraud. I have a theory that MasterCard and Visa themselves require their licensees to honour force bills.
I had someone sign up for a subscription service with my card (probably skimmed at a hotel). I called, argued with the card issuer for 15 minutes before they reversed the charge and cancelled the card (and issued a new one). That *should* have been the end of it. But then a month later, that same subscription was billed again, and to the *new* card number which I had given to exactly nobody. I called a bitched out the card issuer. They used the "force bill" excuse and tried to insist that I had signed up for the service! I bitched them out some more and they eventually reversed the change and did the cancel/reissue dance again. But then they told me that *I* had to contact this outfit, which I never signed up with in the first place, and have them cancel the charge! That shouldn't be my problem if the card issuer allowed a fraudulent charge, and that's leaving aside the fact that there was no way I'd be able to provide an account number or anything like that so that the merchant doing the charge could even find the fraudulent account. Yet if they had simply blocked everything going to the originally cancelled card number, there would be no problem. (I did, eventually, get it sorted out by calling the merchant. Something I wouldn't have done if it wasn't a reasonably reputable one. But that doesn't change that I shouldn't have had to.)
Why they allow anything on a card number that was cancelled for fraud is beyond me.
It's a bit inconvenient to cause a chargeback, though. It usually involves the fraud department at the card issuer and they will insist on issuing a new card with a new number. That is, after they insist that you're lying to them for 15 minutes.
Still, it works well enough until the company in question "force bills" you. "Force billing" allows the merchant to obtain your new credit card number and expiration date. Even if your card was cancelled due to fraudulent charges by that company. And then your card issuer will tell you that *you* have to get that company to cancel the charges. Even if you never signed up with said company. (Basically, the whole "force billing" thing is the credit card companies being complicit in fraud.)
This seems to be all very mundane. They are going to make tunnels, which are well understood. Then they are going to put something in the tunnels. From TFA, that something is not anything crazy. For a system like this, there's no reason the capsules can't be automated as long as sensible safety precautions are taken, which are also fairly well understood. It's a closed system so there are no external conflicts to be managed. And if the fancy-ass capsule system doesn't work as expected, it can drop back to a scheduled train style service.
It seems like the "news" here is really just a bunch of hype because one of Mr. Musk's companies is involved. Indeed, I can't really decide from TFA what constitutes the actual project and what is just speculation based on other things Musk has rattled on about.
Note that I'm not saying the project necessarily makes sense. Just that it's a fairly mundane sort of project.
I"m not the GP, but in my opinion, the problem with short selling is this: you're selling something you do not own, akin to selling the Eiffel Tower or the Brooklyn Bridge. Yes, I know it's a bit more complicated than that when you bring things like futures into it, but for stocks, it's straight up fraudulent. Legal, sure, but fraudulent nonetheless. (So is fractional or no reserve lending, by the way. Lending money you do not possess is no better and that is the cornerstone of fractional reserve.)
Am I the only one who read the headline and immediatley had a picture of a gigantic rube goldberg style machine clanking away and belching great plumes smoke periodically with newspapers with various front page coming out on a conveyor belt? Maybe I saw that in a cartoon somewhen. Now it's stuck in my head.
I would actually go so far as to say that the majority of criminals are dim.
The majority of criminals who get caught, you mean. Don't forget to account for sampling bias.
Actually, I do mean the actual majority (I'm expressing an opinion) but your point about sampling bias is definitely valid. We have something akin to the survivorshp bias here since we don't know (by definition) about some number of criminals who are never caught. We know about those whose crimes are detected but aren't caught, but we don't know about the ones whose crimes are not detected at all (or never reported). There's obviously an element of luck, and also an element of dimness on the side of law enforcement in many cases, too.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily disprove my statement, either, but yours is definitely a lot more defensible since it doesn't rely on information that we'll almost certainly never have. I just happen to believe (but can't prove) that the vast majority of criminals are dim. Which is why I said I would "go so far as to say".
You do realize that the "possessive" formation in English is used for more than just ownership, yes? It also refers to simple possession without ownership, and can even be used to signify proximity or relation to the subject. Thus, "my east", "my street", etc.
I will now stop responding to ACs for some indeterminate time while I study the lack of snow removal on "my" street.
I would actually go so far as to say that the majority of criminals are dim. We just don't hear about many of those cases (unless they are particularly funny or the stupidity is particularly egregious) since they are usually dead easy to solve. Things like criminal poses for the security camera on the way in to rob a place, with his face in full view. That sort of dim.
But, to be fair, most people don't have a clue about location services, or the fact that their location is stored in the pictures they take, or anything like that. Even people that are not "dim". Even people that know about it and think it's pretty neat don't think about it any further. People don't think about the implications of things. Even reasonably intelligent people who are often busy doing other things.
None of that erases your other point, though. It's a major slippery slope and we must not allow fishing expeditions under any circumstances. The mere coincidence of your device thinking it's near some location at some time should not be usable as "probably cause" because in that case, you don't have the probable cause until you have the information from your fishing expedition. Probably cause needs to come first, not as a result of the fishing.
It isn't a grammar issue for whether to use "saving" or "savings". It's what the official name of the thing is that matters. If the relevant authorities say it is "saving", it is "saving". If they agree that "savings" is okay, then "savings" is okay. It's about naming things correctly, not grammar. Whether the name makes grammatic sense of not *does not matter*. Names need not make any sense whatsoever. They just *are* and behave like any other noun grammatically no matter how they were formed.
What is clear is that there is a natural tendency to use "savings" in this context in English for whatever reason (whether it's due to the reason suggested in the summary or some more fundamental thing about English syntax/grammar) and that tendancy goes back a *long* time. That should suggest to the relevant authorities and pedants alike that insisting on "saving" is a lost cause.
(And don't get me started on things that various pedant types have insisted are incorrect but which have no basis in the history of English. Like not splitting infinities or not ending sentences with prepositions, both things that English has done since forever. But that's off topic here.)
I seem to have been using a master password with Firefox's password manager thing for ages so unless I'm delusional, that's not new functionality. Why is the existence of a semi-functional (can't be reset currently) master password on this "lockbox" thing even an important development? Does it protect something the existing implementation doesn't? Indeed, why do I even need an "improved" password manager when the existing one actually works? (Well, a UI button would be nice on occasion, sure, but that seems a fairly trivial thing to add and wouldn't need any fancy beta/alpha development phase.)
MasterCard and their ilk (Visa, etc.) are complicit with the fraudsters. They have every interest in allowing fraudulent transactions to happen because they get a cut of the transaction from the merchant. Then they get another cut of the reversal transaction from the merchant (in the form of penalties, etc.). And if they don't, the issuing bank almost certainly does with their transactions fees. So they really aren't interested in enforcing *safe* conduct with credit cards and honest behviour on the part of merchants.
With policies like "force billing" which allows the merchant to obtain replacement card details if they have the old ones, *even if the old card was cancelled due to fraudulent charges*, even disputing fraudlent charges doesn't stop the fraudulent charges. (Before someone jumps in with why force billing is good, I don't care. If it had proper controls on it, it might be tolerable. But it doesn't. And I'm speaking from personal experience there so don't tell me it does have such protections.)
Hell, they won't even go after merchants that go out of their way to hide terms and conditions of "free offers" and the like (and other deceptive tactics) and merrily allow ongoing billing for subscriptions that people had no idea they were agreeing to. As long as there is a link in micro font at the bottom of a eleven mile long scrolling page, ten miles from the payment form, apparently it's all kosher in their minds. And those are the types of merchants that will most likely be the ones to employ force billing.
It seems a bit disingenuous to suggest that *experimental* systems that are running on general purpose computing platforms are going to be the actual endgame and then using that to decide that self driving cars are going to have a problem with power consumption. Of course, I don't know what the specific tech involved in each self drive system actually is. However, because everything is experimental at this point, it is pretty much certain that nothing is optimized. It would be a waste of resources to optimize at this stage of the game. I can guarantee that the makers of self driving cars are going to be doing everything they can to minimize the power draw of their control systems simply because they need to compete on *range*. Anything that drains the battery is on the table for optimization or removal if they can improve range.
Once they work out exactly what sensors they need, how to process the data, and all that, then no doubt most of that processing smarts will move down into custom devices optimized for the specific tasks which will almost certainly remove a lot of the power consumption. That's not to say there won't be more power consumption in a self driving car than a human operated one. After all, even the human brain takes a nontrivial amount of energy to operate!
I don't know why they don't just admit that *everyone's* information is compromised and just be done with it.
And then all credit bureaus should be forcibly shut down their databases burned. They are completely unneccessary and it's not even clear they provide a benefit to the lenders that use (and pay) them.
I doubt that would have worked out. That "little drive north" would be into Canada, which is most definitely not the UK. (Canada is an independent nation with its own laws and policies, believe it or not.) There's no guarantee he would be allowed in to Canada. (UK citizens are refused entry all the time.) If the CBSA folks are aware of the bail conditions, there's a good chance that would be reason to turn him back. Of course, he could try walking across the border and avoiding the border stations, but that's not as easy as it sounds.
Then, if he did get across the border, he would have to travel on through Canada to get to the UK. At any point during that travel, he might be picked up in response to an extradition request (which would almost certainly be immediately granted in this case since it doesn't look like he has a case for requesting asylum nor is there any evidence that due process has been violated). The most likely places for that would be at the transportation hubs that have flights or ships to the UK.
Alternatively, he can stay where he is, run things through the courts and find out just what the case against him is and defend it. At no point to date has there been any obvious violation of due process and he is out on bail with conditions that are not particularly onerous given that he is a foreign national.
Because it is significantly cheaper and easier to wait for someone to be on your own territory where your laws are sovereign than to try to get foreign state which has different laws to cooperate. Even a friendly foreign state. Extradition is often a complex mess and often requires, among other things, the party requesting extradition to demonstrate that the alleged crime actually is illegal in the juridiction being asked to extradite.
I think you'll find this turns out *not* to be true. What is significant in the "local part" of the email address is *up to the local system* as long as it is in the set of characters that are permitted. Of course, Google (and anyone else for that matter) is perfectly allowed to ignore dots in the local part. But everyone is also perfectly allowed to treat them as significant.
Also, your wiki link does not back up your assertion that "A.BC" and "ABC" must be the same mailbox. It only gives rules on where a dot can appear unquoted in the local part. It does not say that it is to be ignored when routing.
Additionally, decades of operational practice on the Internet also directly violates your assertion. Dots have *always* been potentially significant for a local part. They were required for compuserve addresses back in the beginning, for instance.
NOTE: I am NOT saying that Google is doing things wrong. What they are doing is allowed. They are free to interpret the local part however they want. However, they are NOT required to ignore dots.
... BankOfArnerica is NOT the same as BankOfAmerica....
Ahh, yes. Good old keming. (Yes, that really is an "m".) A prime example of the current standard practice of removing too much space from between character pairs. There is no good reason that "r" followed by "n" should look like "m" in *any* font. Of course, this type of thing is not new in the world of print. Printers (and scribes) have been preferring "pretty" over "legible" since before Gutenberg.
Slashdot Mirror
Even at my relatively southerly latitude (49 degrees north) summers are light regardless of our nominal time zone. Winters are dark, again, regardless of our time zone. If we stayed on PST (UTC-8) all year the sun would set at 2030 in the summer. What more do people want? And on PDT all year (UTC-7) the sun would still set at 1700 in December. What good is that? It wouldn't rise until 0900. Ugh.
This. A million times this. Though it does depend a bit on where you are in the time zone on the exact sunrise/set times (not counting shenanigans on the time zone boundaries, it varies by an hour, unsurprisingly). Still, it doesn't change the fact that if you're at a high enough latitude or close enough to the equator, the benefits of DST are, well, dubious at best.
On another note, the idea of using DST all year is really just a way to get people to shift their day by an hour without them realizing it. That may have some benefit outside of the typical DST effective dates depending on latitude, though probably not so much during the shortest days of the year.
(Also, the link between time changes and heart attacks is tenuous at best. Sure, the additional stress from changing one's sleep schedule might, maybe, serve to cause a heart attack to trigger earlier than it might have, but it's not at all clear that such attacks wouldn't happen anyway a few days or weeks later. Even if there is a real link, typical dumbass shift rotations would be a much larger problem since the time change is twice a year but most dumbass shift rotations are changing shifts every couple of weeks at best and multiple times per week at worst.)
It's not really surprising, but so many of these "profanity" and "spam" filters just compare a list of "words" against the input using a naïve substring match with no concern for even word boundaries. I mean, just because you might think "tart" is offensive, I highly doubt you would think "start" is. (If you do, then you are the one with the problem.)
As far as I can tell, this sort of thing is usually motivated by the "ZOMG!!!1111!!!!11!!!!11!!1 Think of the children!!!!!!111!!1!!!1!!" types in management or management caving to those types. And, of course, the developers are given three microseconds to implement an impossible filter that will Protect The Children. Sometimes management even comes along with a list of Bad Words. Even if that isn't the case, the developers are going to look at the request, realize how impossible it is, and do the simplest thing that they can that will convince management that their system can now Protect The Children.
This is, of course, a subset of a more general problem of incorrect validation of input. The number of times I've had my perfectly valid email address rejected because there is a hyphen in the domain name, or worse, because it doesn't end in ".com", ".org", or ".net" (yes, that happened a couple of times, though not recently) is astounding. I even had my perfectly valid postal address rejected by a validation tool run by the national post office once.
That's one of the problems with a UBI scheme. Figuring out what that benchmark should be is hard. The idea is that the UBI should give people the ability to subsist without having to move across an international border (because that's difficult or impossible for many people) as long as they're careful with their money. However, that doesn't mean they should be able to subsist anywhere they choose. Just that they can if the are sensible and don't insist on living somewhere too expensive or have luxuries they can't afford. Exactly what that benchmark should be depends on the country in question. (And it really should only apply to citizens (or equivalent) of that country and probably not be offered to citizens living abroad.)
That sort of problem is one of the reasons I don't necessarily support such a scheme (as I said in my original post). I just don't see any variant of today's world that is likely to occur in the foreseeable future where this type of system could work. (There are other issues than figuring out what the basic income should be that make it questionable, and not all of them are with the idea of UBI itself.)
I don't think Toronto or Vancouver have a nicer standard of living. I was using them as an example of expensive markets which should not be used as a factor in detemrining what level a UBI should be set at. I'll stick with the city I live in which is much more livable.
I didn't actually say Toronto or Vancouver is a "nicer standard of living" though I can see how you inferred that from what I wrote. I could have been clearer but we can't expect perfect prose from random commenters on /., now, can we?
Let me prefix this by saying that I don't necessarily support implementing a UBI system. However, I have yet to see anything called a "basic income" or "universal basic incomie" pilot program actually do things at all correctly. As other commenters have suggested, these pilot programs seem to be designed so that they must necessarily fail and be examples the politicians can point at and say, "See? We tried it and it failed." I'm not convinced UBI can actually work, but it definitely won't work if it isn't done right.
To do UBI correctly, it has to go to everybody. And it has to *replace* any income support programs. That is, it has to replace government programs such as (un)employment insurance, government pension plans not funded completely and directly by member contributions (because everyone would get UBI, the pension plan wouldn't be required, would it?). There also can't be any clawback because someone earned some money outside of the program. Doing that just adds administrative cost to the program and discourages recipients from working. Also, every person should get the same amount regardless of age, marital status, etc., though maybe with a minimum age before it kicks in. Otherwise, you recreate existing complex administration processes.
Now, here's the absolutely critical component. This UBI must not be set at a level where the recipient can afford a car, nice television, nice house, 127 cats, and the like. It should provide for *healthy* subsistence in a reasonable market and require careful management of money to do so (which encourages those who won't work to move out of the expensive cities like Vancouver or Toronto and those who want a nicer standard of living to work). It needs to be set such that if you want a nice living, you have to earn additional money, on which you pay taxes. (Also, under a proper UBI system, only the UBI itself would be income tax exempt. There would be no need for low end tax brackets under such a system.)
Limited pilot programs just aren't going to demonstrate anything because they're not going to work exclusive of existing income support programs and are going to potentially unbalance the labour force because the people getting free money can work for less. (That's probably why the clawback had to be there in this case.) To truly demonstrate whether such a system can work, it has to be tried at a fairly large scale and *existing* income support programs must be suspended for anyone participating in such a test.
Now I do understand that there is always going to be someone who isn't well served by such a program. But that's true of all the current options, too. If you're going to insist that it has to be perfect for everyone, then are you willing to give up all the existing social programs that you currently benefit from on that same principle? I thought not. So let's not create strawmen out of extreme edge cases since *every* system has those.
I left my previous job (about 2 decades ago) because my employer at the time was slowly going under. As soon as they even suggested that payroll would be late one month, I started looking. They even tried to stiff me on my final paycheck by saying "you didn't work those last two days of the month" (it was a weekend and not normal work days) so I think I got out just in time. They did hold on for another year or so but eventually tanked and their assets were bought out by another company that tanked a few years later itself. Within a few years, my take home had close to doubled (to within the industry average at the time once you exclude the unreasonable outliers that skewed the average substantially upward).
My current job probably won't last until I retire (because reasons that make sense), but the past couple decades have been far better than the 18 months at the previous job.
Ahh, yes. The good old "force bill". Basically the card issuers being complicity in fraud. I have a theory that MasterCard and Visa themselves require their licensees to honour force bills.
I had someone sign up for a subscription service with my card (probably skimmed at a hotel). I called, argued with the card issuer for 15 minutes before they reversed the charge and cancelled the card (and issued a new one). That *should* have been the end of it. But then a month later, that same subscription was billed again, and to the *new* card number which I had given to exactly nobody. I called a bitched out the card issuer. They used the "force bill" excuse and tried to insist that I had signed up for the service! I bitched them out some more and they eventually reversed the change and did the cancel/reissue dance again. But then they told me that *I* had to contact this outfit, which I never signed up with in the first place, and have them cancel the charge! That shouldn't be my problem if the card issuer allowed a fraudulent charge, and that's leaving aside the fact that there was no way I'd be able to provide an account number or anything like that so that the merchant doing the charge could even find the fraudulent account. Yet if they had simply blocked everything going to the originally cancelled card number, there would be no problem. (I did, eventually, get it sorted out by calling the merchant. Something I wouldn't have done if it wasn't a reasonably reputable one. But that doesn't change that I shouldn't have had to.)
Why they allow anything on a card number that was cancelled for fraud is beyond me.
It's a bit inconvenient to cause a chargeback, though. It usually involves the fraud department at the card issuer and they will insist on issuing a new card with a new number. That is, after they insist that you're lying to them for 15 minutes.
Still, it works well enough until the company in question "force bills" you. "Force billing" allows the merchant to obtain your new credit card number and expiration date. Even if your card was cancelled due to fraudulent charges by that company. And then your card issuer will tell you that *you* have to get that company to cancel the charges. Even if you never signed up with said company. (Basically, the whole "force billing" thing is the credit card companies being complicit in fraud.)
This seems to be all very mundane. They are going to make tunnels, which are well understood. Then they are going to put something in the tunnels. From TFA, that something is not anything crazy. For a system like this, there's no reason the capsules can't be automated as long as sensible safety precautions are taken, which are also fairly well understood. It's a closed system so there are no external conflicts to be managed. And if the fancy-ass capsule system doesn't work as expected, it can drop back to a scheduled train style service.
It seems like the "news" here is really just a bunch of hype because one of Mr. Musk's companies is involved. Indeed, I can't really decide from TFA what constitutes the actual project and what is just speculation based on other things Musk has rattled on about.
Note that I'm not saying the project necessarily makes sense. Just that it's a fairly mundane sort of project.
I"m not the GP, but in my opinion, the problem with short selling is this: you're selling something you do not own, akin to selling the Eiffel Tower or the Brooklyn Bridge. Yes, I know it's a bit more complicated than that when you bring things like futures into it, but for stocks, it's straight up fraudulent. Legal, sure, but fraudulent nonetheless. (So is fractional or no reserve lending, by the way. Lending money you do not possess is no better and that is the cornerstone of fractional reserve.)
Oh, good. For a moment, I had this horrible thought that I might not be strange.
Am I the only one who read the headline and immediatley had a picture of a gigantic rube goldberg style machine clanking away and belching great plumes smoke periodically with newspapers with various front page coming out on a conveyor belt? Maybe I saw that in a cartoon somewhen. Now it's stuck in my head.
I would actually go so far as to say that the majority of criminals are dim.
The majority of criminals who get caught, you mean. Don't forget to account for sampling bias.
Actually, I do mean the actual majority (I'm expressing an opinion) but your point about sampling bias is definitely valid. We have something akin to the survivorshp bias here since we don't know (by definition) about some number of criminals who are never caught. We know about those whose crimes are detected but aren't caught, but we don't know about the ones whose crimes are not detected at all (or never reported). There's obviously an element of luck, and also an element of dimness on the side of law enforcement in many cases, too.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily disprove my statement, either, but yours is definitely a lot more defensible since it doesn't rely on information that we'll almost certainly never have. I just happen to believe (but can't prove) that the vast majority of criminals are dim. Which is why I said I would "go so far as to say".
You do realize that the "possessive" formation in English is used for more than just ownership, yes? It also refers to simple possession without ownership, and can even be used to signify proximity or relation to the subject. Thus, "my east", "my street", etc.
I will now stop responding to ACs for some indeterminate time while I study the lack of snow removal on "my" street.
I would actually go so far as to say that the majority of criminals are dim. We just don't hear about many of those cases (unless they are particularly funny or the stupidity is particularly egregious) since they are usually dead easy to solve. Things like criminal poses for the security camera on the way in to rob a place, with his face in full view. That sort of dim.
But, to be fair, most people don't have a clue about location services, or the fact that their location is stored in the pictures they take, or anything like that. Even people that are not "dim". Even people that know about it and think it's pretty neat don't think about it any further. People don't think about the implications of things. Even reasonably intelligent people who are often busy doing other things.
None of that erases your other point, though. It's a major slippery slope and we must not allow fishing expeditions under any circumstances. The mere coincidence of your device thinking it's near some location at some time should not be usable as "probably cause" because in that case, you don't have the probable cause until you have the information from your fishing expedition. Probably cause needs to come first, not as a result of the fishing.
It isn't a grammar issue for whether to use "saving" or "savings". It's what the official name of the thing is that matters. If the relevant authorities say it is "saving", it is "saving". If they agree that "savings" is okay, then "savings" is okay. It's about naming things correctly, not grammar. Whether the name makes grammatic sense of not *does not matter*. Names need not make any sense whatsoever. They just *are* and behave like any other noun grammatically no matter how they were formed.
What is clear is that there is a natural tendency to use "savings" in this context in English for whatever reason (whether it's due to the reason suggested in the summary or some more fundamental thing about English syntax/grammar) and that tendancy goes back a *long* time. That should suggest to the relevant authorities and pedants alike that insisting on "saving" is a lost cause.
(And don't get me started on things that various pedant types have insisted are incorrect but which have no basis in the history of English. Like not splitting infinities or not ending sentences with prepositions, both things that English has done since forever. But that's off topic here.)
I seem to have been using a master password with Firefox's password manager thing for ages so unless I'm delusional, that's not new functionality. Why is the existence of a semi-functional (can't be reset currently) master password on this "lockbox" thing even an important development? Does it protect something the existing implementation doesn't? Indeed, why do I even need an "improved" password manager when the existing one actually works? (Well, a UI button would be nice on occasion, sure, but that seems a fairly trivial thing to add and wouldn't need any fancy beta/alpha development phase.)
MasterCard and their ilk (Visa, etc.) are complicit with the fraudsters. They have every interest in allowing fraudulent transactions to happen because they get a cut of the transaction from the merchant. Then they get another cut of the reversal transaction from the merchant (in the form of penalties, etc.). And if they don't, the issuing bank almost certainly does with their transactions fees. So they really aren't interested in enforcing *safe* conduct with credit cards and honest behviour on the part of merchants.
With policies like "force billing" which allows the merchant to obtain replacement card details if they have the old ones, *even if the old card was cancelled due to fraudulent charges*, even disputing fraudlent charges doesn't stop the fraudulent charges. (Before someone jumps in with why force billing is good, I don't care. If it had proper controls on it, it might be tolerable. But it doesn't. And I'm speaking from personal experience there so don't tell me it does have such protections.)
Hell, they won't even go after merchants that go out of their way to hide terms and conditions of "free offers" and the like (and other deceptive tactics) and merrily allow ongoing billing for subscriptions that people had no idea they were agreeing to. As long as there is a link in micro font at the bottom of a eleven mile long scrolling page, ten miles from the payment form, apparently it's all kosher in their minds. And those are the types of merchants that will most likely be the ones to employ force billing.
"there will be assignation attempts" ... that's almost certainly a typo or autocorrect run amok, but if it isn't, you, sir, win twelve internets.
(For those who don't get it, hint: look up "assignation".)
It seems a bit disingenuous to suggest that *experimental* systems that are running on general purpose computing platforms are going to be the actual endgame and then using that to decide that self driving cars are going to have a problem with power consumption. Of course, I don't know what the specific tech involved in each self drive system actually is. However, because everything is experimental at this point, it is pretty much certain that nothing is optimized. It would be a waste of resources to optimize at this stage of the game. I can guarantee that the makers of self driving cars are going to be doing everything they can to minimize the power draw of their control systems simply because they need to compete on *range*. Anything that drains the battery is on the table for optimization or removal if they can improve range.
Once they work out exactly what sensors they need, how to process the data, and all that, then no doubt most of that processing smarts will move down into custom devices optimized for the specific tasks which will almost certainly remove a lot of the power consumption. That's not to say there won't be more power consumption in a self driving car than a human operated one. After all, even the human brain takes a nontrivial amount of energy to operate!
I don't know why they don't just admit that *everyone's* information is compromised and just be done with it.
And then all credit bureaus should be forcibly shut down their databases burned. They are completely unneccessary and it's not even clear they provide a benefit to the lenders that use (and pay) them.
I doubt that would have worked out. That "little drive north" would be into Canada, which is most definitely not the UK. (Canada is an independent nation with its own laws and policies, believe it or not.) There's no guarantee he would be allowed in to Canada. (UK citizens are refused entry all the time.) If the CBSA folks are aware of the bail conditions, there's a good chance that would be reason to turn him back. Of course, he could try walking across the border and avoiding the border stations, but that's not as easy as it sounds.
Then, if he did get across the border, he would have to travel on through Canada to get to the UK. At any point during that travel, he might be picked up in response to an extradition request (which would almost certainly be immediately granted in this case since it doesn't look like he has a case for requesting asylum nor is there any evidence that due process has been violated). The most likely places for that would be at the transportation hubs that have flights or ships to the UK.
Alternatively, he can stay where he is, run things through the courts and find out just what the case against him is and defend it. At no point to date has there been any obvious violation of due process and he is out on bail with conditions that are not particularly onerous given that he is a foreign national.
Because it is significantly cheaper and easier to wait for someone to be on your own territory where your laws are sovereign than to try to get foreign state which has different laws to cooperate. Even a friendly foreign state. Extradition is often a complex mess and often requires, among other things, the party requesting extradition to demonstrate that the alleged crime actually is illegal in the juridiction being asked to extradite.
I think you'll find this turns out *not* to be true. What is significant in the "local part" of the email address is *up to the local system* as long as it is in the set of characters that are permitted. Of course, Google (and anyone else for that matter) is perfectly allowed to ignore dots in the local part. But everyone is also perfectly allowed to treat them as significant.
Also, your wiki link does not back up your assertion that "A.BC" and "ABC" must be the same mailbox. It only gives rules on where a dot can appear unquoted in the local part. It does not say that it is to be ignored when routing.
Additionally, decades of operational practice on the Internet also directly violates your assertion. Dots have *always* been potentially significant for a local part. They were required for compuserve addresses back in the beginning, for instance.
NOTE: I am NOT saying that Google is doing things wrong. What they are doing is allowed. They are free to interpret the local part however they want. However, they are NOT required to ignore dots.
... BankOfArnerica is NOT the same as BankOfAmerica....
Ahh, yes. Good old keming. (Yes, that really is an "m".) A prime example of the current standard practice of removing too much space from between character pairs. There is no good reason that "r" followed by "n" should look like "m" in *any* font. Of course, this type of thing is not new in the world of print. Printers (and scribes) have been preferring "pretty" over "legible" since before Gutenberg.