Oh, you should really look at the WSJ closer. Despite the often-ridiculous stances of their editorial page, their news room is one of the most reputable and high quality in the business. We should be thanking them for keeping quality reporting and investigation alive in this environment.
I am confused why this launch vehicle needs to exist (and this is the first I'd heard of it so maybe I'm uninformed).
It’s supposed to air-launch multiple Pegasus rockets at once (Pegasus = small 1000lb payload).But those rockets already are reliably launched by an old L-1011 by Orbital Sciences. see wiki page
The cost of that plane is not huge, and I wonder why launching 3 at once would be so useful that they'd design and fly satellites with a totally unproven aircraft?
This article, first of all, is so vapid and devoid of updated actual information it's embarrassing. Which case is it? Link to the docket / documents? If Slashdot could choose it's sources better, that would be great, thanks...
Second, and more on content -- these vapid articles always quote the maximum fine because they can't be bothered to do the research to figure out what part of the ruling is applicable. Sure, a $100B company *could* be fined 10% according to the legislation, but if you dig into the details, what court / ruling would actually fine an entire company for a relatively separate and contained part of its business? And could all of Alphabet parent actually be fined for it's one product in one region? Umm... maybe that would be the more reasonable thing to explain. The answer is pretty much, "no".
Finally, if Google takes the position that all it is providing is opinions on search results and links to websites that it finds interesting, how can it be sued for ranking one thing higher than another? Unless the EU commission takes an overly expansive view of the term "monopoly"?
I am a little surprised at how open Europeans are to their own form of religious zealotry compared to Americans-- which comes in the pursuing vague notions of privacy and competition without regard to practicality....
... for a court to be putting into a "like" button.
For one thing, does "liking" using the button imply endorsement? Does "like" mean what they think it means? Or was the person's intention? And what if it was inadvertent clicking?
What if the button was called "interesting..." instead?
You would think that a court would restrain itself and hesitate to rule, given so many possibilities of meaning and ambiguities here...
How about they work on the correct problem? I don't think the internet spreading the leaked exams is the issue, it's that the exams are leaked...
Might as well shut down electricity in the whole country to be absolutely sure, huh? Kind of a sign of a backwards government policy (or reflecting the lack of importance of internet/connectivity) when one small problem can cause a whole other system to be shut down...
This is about an issue that quietly gets handled appropriately by the few people it actually involves, without much fuss or muss, in the individual environments of schools, office buildings, businesses, etc. And nobody cares that much, until one side decides to make it a big political battle, trying to relate it to some big symbolic issue that it in reality has very little to do with. Or when some dumb suburban parent with more volume than common sense thinks their kids or "values" are at risk, no matter how distant or nebulous the chances.
And ultimately, because most of the time when someone paints something into a big symbolic picture, they're going to get smacked down because it turns out that the reality doesn't match the symbolism. Plus when it comes down to real $, businesses won't stand for stupidity that costs them money.
Honestly, I am constantly amazed how much of public discourse is consumed by symbolic issues that may evoke some weird opinion, but in reality concern an issue that's pretty much #47 on the list of important things for us to get done. How many transgender people have you even encountered on a daily basis? 0.1%? Is this even that order of magnitude a problem to deserve this level of attention and distration of a government?
Stop believing and worrying so much about symbols and symbolic issues, and deal with the 25 more important things that actually are killing our productivity and growth every day, you governing morons. Do your job - and govern!
"Apple kicks dogs and steals from your grandmother!"
What a shallow and attention-seeking headline. Ask yourself, how complex is the issue of making a manufacturer publish repair guides so that the public could repair an iPhone? Is it not conceivable that companies might object to some kinds of requirements a law might implement, that would be unworkable?
If a handset company were required to publish guides on how to fix the graphics coprocessor if it broke, would it be sufficient if the instructions said, "buy a new phone"? Or did you mean that the manual should instruct the user on how to remove the SoC, procure a new one, solder it in, preserve/restore all the security features and keys that actually cannot be disentagled from the old SoC and losing the user's data in the process, and then putting it through testing and verification that it works properly? (to give a silly hypothetical)
Exactly what types of broken states of a phone are you requiring a company to publish guides to fix, and make parts available for? Do you even know how many different ways a modern phone can fail? And what level of fix are you requiring they make available, and for what level of user capability? It's going to be pretty much useless if grandpa can't manipulate the microtweezers to fix the parts of the rear-facing camera module, so what then?
Electronic devices have come a lot farther than a car engine that you could demand be user-serviceable, and these laws are misguided attempts to make them so. Don't make a company the villain for objecting to things that are nice in (ancient) principle, but unworkable in reality.
I hope they will quickly do away with the Touch Bar, which, as much a fan of Macbooks that I am, has been totally useless. Even worse, it interferes and causes errors when I do other tasks that happen to go near the Touch Bar, such as the calculator.
Every time I try to use the calculator (and the top row of number keys) my fingers graze the Touch Bar, which then triggers an incorrect calculation because the Bar adopt some calculator function keys while open.
There is something positive to be said about having keys that have physical boundaries and limited functions, and having that well separated from a touch bar which, if it provided some actually useful function, had the versatility to change roles during use. They should have kept dedicated physical volume, brightness keys -- which now hide behind 2 finger presses on a strip that you have to look at carefully to find where to press.
Aside from that inconvenience, I have to date used the Touch Bar approximately 0 times productively. I am not a video manipulator, so maybe that's what it's designed for, but so far, nothing. I am not really in need of having quick access to emoticons when I chat, thank you Apple...
1. Don't enforce needlessly strict / complicated security policies for websites that don't matter that much.
2. Don't make me reset my password when I've merely forgotten it - it just puts me into a never-ending loop of creating harder and harder to remember passwords that need to be constantly reset.
3. Provide easy to use 2 factor authentication that lets me use simpler passwords, or even delay the "authentication" to be when I pay for something and validate my billing address.
4. Take on more of the security burden yourselves, and detect when malicious agents are doing unusual things, rather than requiring the users to negotiate needlessly secure procedures.
Maybe after all these things are in place, we can talk about biometric methods.
How about Google does the simple experiment of ceasing to host any streaming music of the major labels and they can report back exactly how much better they're doing! If they want to put their money where their mouth is?
[all numbers below approximate for commentary purposes...]
Interesting that a company which took in $150 million in revenue in the last year, paid out $2 billion to all of its option holders and employees. It's almost as if modern tech companies are just vehicles for approximately 500 people to get rich after conducting the right social experiment that users seem to enjoy... And the investor / VC community is looking for the next one that does this and gives them the same returns, who cares what the technology is. "We'll buy anything!"
Amazing what our collective social likes and dislikes manage to power, when harnessed by some small group that's figured out how to monetize it. I think that's the greatest wealth inequality of all these days...
So, you mean that in 300 million people, there are probably a few at the top who we can generally be ok with taxing at 85% or something like that, correct? Somehow I don't see that happening in the current climate.
Oops, sorry forgot a power of 10^3. Each person in the US pays approx. $2000-3000 (on average) towards federal welfare programs. The argument (and question) still holds.
And by the way, the above is not meant to be derisive about the possibility of this program, just a pure numerical analysis.
Have a look at this too:
In the US, we spend $707B in federal funds on welfare programs (not incl. SS or Medicare). That equals about $2-3 paid by every person on average. If you talked about a "basic income of $30,000 policy", you would be saying that we would each on average be paying $30,000 annually to fund this program.
Well... yes, of course everyone generally wants free money, right? Of course they're going to vote for it.
But someone please correct my thought experiment here to understand who will pay for it:
Suppose our society is just 100 people. We're going to give everyone $30,000 in basic income, for example. Where does it come from? Everyone pays $30,000 in taxes to fund the pool of money that pays everyone $30,000 each? What would be the point of that?
No, it must be that people at the top of the income scale are taxed (in a sliding proportion up the scale of course) to pay for the people at the bottom of the scale who aren't making any income that can be taxed? The guy making $1M at the top of society gets taxed 50% to fund 16 people at the bottom who get the basic income and don't have income to be taxed. The 2nd guy making $900k gets taxed 40% to pay for 12 people earning the basic income, etc. etc. and down the scale.
How else would it work?
So this is basically a large wealth transfer (which all taxes in principle are), not some utopian new idea that somehow pays for itself, right?
What am I missing? The role of corporations? The internet? What makes this different from just another kind of tax and welfare system, or somehow magically paid for because of today's economic dynamics? Scale it to a country's population size, and all we're doing is saying that the very wealthiest at the top can afford to pay this tax, and they're a very small portion of the population, right? (this tax is all the more affordable to the general population, the more the income inequality curve is distorted from a flat distribution - in fact in a flat distribution you cannot afford to pay a basic income)
How about we stop trying to fund California (which by the way provides well more than its share of tax revenues to the federal gov't compared to its receipts) using taxes on new industries and new people who help us create new value, and instead remove the tax protections for entrenched old people who got here first, got theirs, and now are happy to put most of the share of the burden on everyone else? Prop 13, unions, local regulations that prevent affordble housing -- I'm looking at you.
You know, in ancient Rome and even outlying territories, they had worked out that commercial deliveries had to be restricted to certain hours to make things manageable. You would think we would um, take advantage of proven techniques like that?
How about the CEO eliminates the word "cold-pressed" juice from any public discussion, since it's pretty much meaningless and one of the menu-enhancing words to make people think something is more elaborate or valuable than it is? When have you had juice that is not "cold-pressed"? It's all fucking "cold-pressed". So stop saying that.
It's like "Locally-sourced Niman Ranch charcoal-seared pork chop". A load of enhancement words that just try to make you think something more than it is. It's a fucking pork chop. It's fucking juice.
This is the part where the movie theater associations of each state get together and protest the movie studios being allowed to sell directly to customers, right?
$1 penalty per leaked / stolen record, imposed by the FTC/SEC/SSA/CFPB will quickly remedy this problem. As long as the value of private personal information is intangible, the value it will be assigned in companies' risk assessments and capital plans is $0.
But I guess that would be a burdensome regulation under our new regime.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you should really look at the WSJ closer. Despite the often-ridiculous stances of their editorial page, their news room is one of the most reputable and high quality in the business. We should be thanking them for keeping quality reporting and investigation alive in this environment.
I am confused why this launch vehicle needs to exist (and this is the first I'd heard of it so maybe I'm uninformed).
It’s supposed to air-launch multiple Pegasus rockets at once (Pegasus = small 1000lb payload).But those rockets already are reliably launched by an old L-1011 by Orbital Sciences. see wiki page
The cost of that plane is not huge, and I wonder why launching 3 at once would be so useful that they'd design and fly satellites with a totally unproven aircraft?
This article, first of all, is so vapid and devoid of updated actual information it's embarrassing. Which case is it? Link to the docket / documents? If Slashdot could choose it's sources better, that would be great, thanks...
Second, and more on content -- these vapid articles always quote the maximum fine because they can't be bothered to do the research to figure out what part of the ruling is applicable. Sure, a $100B company *could* be fined 10% according to the legislation, but if you dig into the details, what court / ruling would actually fine an entire company for a relatively separate and contained part of its business? And could all of Alphabet parent actually be fined for it's one product in one region? Umm... maybe that would be the more reasonable thing to explain. The answer is pretty much, "no".
Finally, if Google takes the position that all it is providing is opinions on search results and links to websites that it finds interesting, how can it be sued for ranking one thing higher than another? Unless the EU commission takes an overly expansive view of the term "monopoly"?
I am a little surprised at how open Europeans are to their own form of religious zealotry compared to Americans-- which comes in the pursuing vague notions of privacy and competition without regard to practicality....
... for a court to be putting into a "like" button.
For one thing, does "liking" using the button imply endorsement? Does "like" mean what they think it means? Or was the person's intention? And what if it was inadvertent clicking?
What if the button was called "interesting..." instead?
You would think that a court would restrain itself and hesitate to rule, given so many possibilities of meaning and ambiguities here...
How about they work on the correct problem? I don't think the internet spreading the leaked exams is the issue, it's that the exams are leaked...
Might as well shut down electricity in the whole country to be absolutely sure, huh? Kind of a sign of a backwards government policy (or reflecting the lack of importance of internet/connectivity) when one small problem can cause a whole other system to be shut down...
I'll tell you what this is:
This is about an issue that quietly gets handled appropriately by the few people it actually involves, without much fuss or muss, in the individual environments of schools, office buildings, businesses, etc. And nobody cares that much, until one side decides to make it a big political battle, trying to relate it to some big symbolic issue that it in reality has very little to do with. Or when some dumb suburban parent with more volume than common sense thinks their kids or "values" are at risk, no matter how distant or nebulous the chances.
And ultimately, because most of the time when someone paints something into a big symbolic picture, they're going to get smacked down because it turns out that the reality doesn't match the symbolism. Plus when it comes down to real $, businesses won't stand for stupidity that costs them money.
Honestly, I am constantly amazed how much of public discourse is consumed by symbolic issues that may evoke some weird opinion, but in reality concern an issue that's pretty much #47 on the list of important things for us to get done. How many transgender people have you even encountered on a daily basis? 0.1%? Is this even that order of magnitude a problem to deserve this level of attention and distration of a government?
Stop believing and worrying so much about symbols and symbolic issues, and deal with the 25 more important things that actually are killing our productivity and growth every day, you governing morons. Do your job - and govern!
I guess this is why you always make your ransom videos on a really shitty old video camera that can't be traced back to anyone...
"Apple kicks dogs and steals from your grandmother!"
What a shallow and attention-seeking headline. Ask yourself, how complex is the issue of making a manufacturer publish repair guides so that the public could repair an iPhone? Is it not conceivable that companies might object to some kinds of requirements a law might implement, that would be unworkable?
If a handset company were required to publish guides on how to fix the graphics coprocessor if it broke, would it be sufficient if the instructions said, "buy a new phone"? Or did you mean that the manual should instruct the user on how to remove the SoC, procure a new one, solder it in, preserve/restore all the security features and keys that actually cannot be disentagled from the old SoC and losing the user's data in the process, and then putting it through testing and verification that it works properly? (to give a silly hypothetical)
Exactly what types of broken states of a phone are you requiring a company to publish guides to fix, and make parts available for? Do you even know how many different ways a modern phone can fail? And what level of fix are you requiring they make available, and for what level of user capability? It's going to be pretty much useless if grandpa can't manipulate the microtweezers to fix the parts of the rear-facing camera module, so what then?
Electronic devices have come a lot farther than a car engine that you could demand be user-serviceable, and these laws are misguided attempts to make them so. Don't make a company the villain for objecting to things that are nice in (ancient) principle, but unworkable in reality.
Thank you - that simple information just changed my life. (a little)
I hope they will quickly do away with the Touch Bar, which, as much a fan of Macbooks that I am, has been totally useless. Even worse, it interferes and causes errors when I do other tasks that happen to go near the Touch Bar, such as the calculator.
Every time I try to use the calculator (and the top row of number keys) my fingers graze the Touch Bar, which then triggers an incorrect calculation because the Bar adopt some calculator function keys while open.
There is something positive to be said about having keys that have physical boundaries and limited functions, and having that well separated from a touch bar which, if it provided some actually useful function, had the versatility to change roles during use. They should have kept dedicated physical volume, brightness keys -- which now hide behind 2 finger presses on a strip that you have to look at carefully to find where to press.
Aside from that inconvenience, I have to date used the Touch Bar approximately 0 times productively. I am not a video manipulator, so maybe that's what it's designed for, but so far, nothing. I am not really in need of having quick access to emoticons when I chat, thank you Apple...
Just use The Great Suspender -- idle tab suspending service: https://chrome.google.com/webs...
Let's have businesses do 4 things:
1. Don't enforce needlessly strict / complicated security policies for websites that don't matter that much.
2. Don't make me reset my password when I've merely forgotten it - it just puts me into a never-ending loop of creating harder and harder to remember passwords that need to be constantly reset.
3. Provide easy to use 2 factor authentication that lets me use simpler passwords, or even delay the "authentication" to be when I pay for something and validate my billing address. 4. Take on more of the security burden yourselves, and detect when malicious agents are doing unusual things, rather than requiring the users to negotiate needlessly secure procedures.
Maybe after all these things are in place, we can talk about biometric methods.
How about Google does the simple experiment of ceasing to host any streaming music of the major labels and they can report back exactly how much better they're doing! If they want to put their money where their mouth is?
[all numbers below approximate for commentary purposes...]
Interesting that a company which took in $150 million in revenue in the last year, paid out $2 billion to all of its option holders and employees. It's almost as if modern tech companies are just vehicles for approximately 500 people to get rich after conducting the right social experiment that users seem to enjoy... And the investor / VC community is looking for the next one that does this and gives them the same returns, who cares what the technology is. "We'll buy anything!"
Amazing what our collective social likes and dislikes manage to power, when harnessed by some small group that's figured out how to monetize it. I think that's the greatest wealth inequality of all these days...
So, you mean that in 300 million people, there are probably a few at the top who we can generally be ok with taxing at 85% or something like that, correct? Somehow I don't see that happening in the current climate.
Oops, sorry forgot a power of 10^3. Each person in the US pays approx. $2000-3000 (on average) towards federal welfare programs. The argument (and question) still holds.
And by the way, the above is not meant to be derisive about the possibility of this program, just a pure numerical analysis.
Have a look at this too:
In the US, we spend $707B in federal funds on welfare programs (not incl. SS or Medicare). That equals about $2-3 paid by every person on average. If you talked about a "basic income of $30,000 policy", you would be saying that we would each on average be paying $30,000 annually to fund this program.
How in the hell would that happen??
Well... yes, of course everyone generally wants free money, right? Of course they're going to vote for it.
But someone please correct my thought experiment here to understand who will pay for it:
Suppose our society is just 100 people. We're going to give everyone $30,000 in basic income, for example. Where does it come from? Everyone pays $30,000 in taxes to fund the pool of money that pays everyone $30,000 each? What would be the point of that?
No, it must be that people at the top of the income scale are taxed (in a sliding proportion up the scale of course) to pay for the people at the bottom of the scale who aren't making any income that can be taxed? The guy making $1M at the top of society gets taxed 50% to fund 16 people at the bottom who get the basic income and don't have income to be taxed. The 2nd guy making $900k gets taxed 40% to pay for 12 people earning the basic income, etc. etc. and down the scale.
How else would it work?
So this is basically a large wealth transfer (which all taxes in principle are), not some utopian new idea that somehow pays for itself, right?
What am I missing? The role of corporations? The internet? What makes this different from just another kind of tax and welfare system, or somehow magically paid for because of today's economic dynamics? Scale it to a country's population size, and all we're doing is saying that the very wealthiest at the top can afford to pay this tax, and they're a very small portion of the population, right? (this tax is all the more affordable to the general population, the more the income inequality curve is distorted from a flat distribution - in fact in a flat distribution you cannot afford to pay a basic income)
Or am I missing something?
How about we stop trying to fund California (which by the way provides well more than its share of tax revenues to the federal gov't compared to its receipts) using taxes on new industries and new people who help us create new value, and instead remove the tax protections for entrenched old people who got here first, got theirs, and now are happy to put most of the share of the burden on everyone else? Prop 13, unions, local regulations that prevent affordble housing -- I'm looking at you.
Nope, exactly the opposite.
You know, in ancient Rome and even outlying territories, they had worked out that commercial deliveries had to be restricted to certain hours to make things manageable. You would think we would um, take advantage of proven techniques like that?
How about the CEO eliminates the word "cold-pressed" juice from any public discussion, since it's pretty much meaningless and one of the menu-enhancing words to make people think something is more elaborate or valuable than it is? When have you had juice that is not "cold-pressed"? It's all fucking "cold-pressed". So stop saying that.
It's like "Locally-sourced Niman Ranch charcoal-seared pork chop". A load of enhancement words that just try to make you think something more than it is. It's a fucking pork chop. It's fucking juice.
This is the part where the movie theater associations of each state get together and protest the movie studios being allowed to sell directly to customers, right?
Oh wait, that's car dealers! Sorry, my mistake.
Read through the full article - that is some seriously impressive detective work to follow through and find the people behind the phishing portal!
$1 penalty per leaked / stolen record, imposed by the FTC/SEC/SSA/CFPB will quickly remedy this problem. As long as the value of private personal information is intangible, the value it will be assigned in companies' risk assessments and capital plans is $0.
But I guess that would be a burdensome regulation under our new regime.