They already *know* which numbers belong to which networks, it's a necessary database that allows number portability so when someone calls a number they know which destination network to switch the call to.
All they need to do is use this database in reverse on calls entering their network to see if the ANI info for the call matches the network it's *supposed* to be coming from.
If ANI on an incoming call says it belongs to the ATT network but its entering from some carrier other than ATT, then it should be dropped as spoofed.
Carriers don't want to do this because they like selling trunks to low-rent VoIP providers who in turn will sell capacity to anyone with a credit card number.
It's also the surety of securities rate of return vs. the risk of loss on product innovation.
If you have $10 billion in capital, you can invest in securities and get 10% or you can risk some or all of it and possibly lose it all if your innovation efforts fail. Even if they succeed, you may only partly succeed and your innovation may still produce a rate of return lower than the securities market.
So you wind up being better off not innovating at all, and just investing your capital in securities markets. All large companies, especially those with a highly dominant product that needs little investment or innovation to maintain its dominance, are kind of at risk into turning into investment funds, since they can get a better rate of return investing than innovating.
Intel tried and failed at a number of things -- 5G, big screen TVs (they had some kind of micro-mirror design they were working on when internal rear projection was still a thing), and maybe a number of other product lines.
But at least Intel *tried* -- has Apple done anything innovative? They can barely muster the R&D money to refresh their non-phone products, and the phone feature pipeline is a trickle of features each year, with a total stranglehold on the platform to make sure their long-term "innovation" plans aren't screwed up.
The only thing that seems to help in these situations is really powerful and compelling competition. In theory, AMD provides this but despite the hoopla over their new CPUs, I don't really see the rank-and-file volume buyers of CPUs doing anything that involves switching to AMD, often because the slight architecture difference is a big problem in virtualization environments. It's sort of similar to Samsung/Apple, too, where even though Samsung phones may have superior hardware, the lack of complete compatibility (different OS, etc) isn't enough to be real competition for most Apple buyers.
It might be argued that this is similar to what took out the Big 3 car-makers in the US. Stagnant product lines and little automotive innovation until buyers found their small, foreign competitors products not just more fuel efficient but more durable and better made.
I wonder if any cities were ever clever enough to require that Google fiber installations be both durable enough to last 20 years without major physical installation maintenance and a salable asset should Google decide they no longer want to run the project.
My guess is no, they all saw this project as a massive savior and that Google would build it to last forever, because Google and Internet.
It's hard to see a Volvo brand as less expensive than a VW-branded vehicle, unless they're trying to strip it of Volvo-like (near) luxury in an attempt to cut costs so that it's not more expensive than an actual Volvo.
It's always amazing to me that the company that gave us the 240DL, the official vehicle of democratic socialism, is now mostly a luxury car company.
My guess is she's better than you think. It's probably a real job with real responsibilities that has a really high income. And if she was half-smart, she'd also know that a black female executive who's actually good at her job is worth a giant pay premium to many companies for the black and female part.
It seems kind of ironic, but so many companies need/want to virtue signal their ethnically diverse makeup that they're fairly desperate to retain and promote female, and especially black female, executives, and will pay premiums to keep the ones that are average-or-better in their positions.
My wife (who isn't black) actually squeezed more money out of her employer for this reason. Her boss actually told her that female executive recruiting and retention was a big deal to global management ("You're actually on a high-value, high achievers list at corporate in Dublin."), and despite getting a bunch of unrequested deferred compensation thrown at her, she also asked for a big raise and they didn't even negotiate, they just gave it to her.
My guess is Peggy Alford doesn't give a shit whether some right wing cranks think she's only where she's at because she's female or black, she's too busy cashing checks and figuring out her new company-supplied Mercedes.
It's cross subsidies within a channel family, like ESPN subsidizing ESPN-3 or MTV subsidizing VH-1 Classic 3 or something.
I think mostly these channels exist because the "root" channel is too valuable for a cable system to lose, so the root channel owner can strong arm the cable system to carry the lesser channels, too.
I think the original idea was to grab up channel space when cable systems had more limited channel capacity, effectively blocking competitors and extending the brand. Now that cable channel capacity is expended via digital encoding, its probably more about branding and additional capacity during large-scale events.
It's not really a "subsidy" in the traditional sense, since the channels are all owned by one company and the company itself is profitable, but the channel wouldn't exist if it didn't have a powerful parent channel to force it onto the cable system. It's not profitable enough from an advertising/carriage fee perspective to actually support its production costs -- to the extent that it has production costs and isn't just running tape delayed content from another channel or other content they already own.
I don't know how you get rid of this, really, as long as you have cable systems willing to play along to keep the likes of ESPN. My guess is the relationship is so symbiotic now that cable systems actually don't mind so long as the total carriage agreement works financially. Bundling keeps cable systems alive by preventing a lot of individual channels from being ala carte, and channel owners just extend it to new "cable-like" streaming services.
The IRS audits people for almost no reason. I got audited 35 years ago when I made near zero money and no discrepancies in my tax filings with reported payroll income. What a waste of time and resources. I was 25 years old and had filed my own taxes since I was 16 years old.
The audit challenges of the very rich are endless. Just one reported source of their taxable income could take a team of forensic accountants and lawyers weeks to validate, they could have dozens or hundreds of these. There's almost no way they could truly audit any 10 rich people in a year, let alone a million of them.
It's not a nation *state*, but arguably (and extremely loosely), you could argue that a "nation" is a pretty ambiguous concept that describes a grouping of people sharing some commonality, and there's no logical reason why race couldn't be a valid criteria for membership whatever nation you're defining.
So in theory, you could be a white nationalist and it would be a logical statement. Just like you could be a black nationalist, a Catholic nationalist, etc.
Audit targeting is also driven by congress. There was a thing on the local NPR station (MPR) today where they were talking about some kind of family/child credit, and how the Republicans (mostly) are super wound up that people who don't qualify are getting it, and there's some law that requires the IRS to audit it.
So they plug in the variables and send automated audit forms to hundreds of thousands of people over family/child credits. The real kicker is that audit compliance is a paper-and-pencil kind of operation, and it ties up a ton of people resources to process the audit compliance they get from people who were audited.
Guess who doesn't get audited? That's right, the rich guys, because the same congress has cut funding to the IRS and the IRS is so busy dealing with mandated audit compliance they don't have the manpower to go after traditional audit targets as much.
Personally I think not having the IRS run online tax filing is idiotic in the extreme. The efficiency increase alone ought to pay for itself.
I might even go one step further and just have the government just automatically file for basic W-2 employees and send them either a bill or a refund automatically, don't even bother with the whole "filing" kabuki theater. Filing would be optional if you had other income or deductions you wanted to report or claim. Since most of that is already automatically reported to the IRS (mortgage interest, bank interest, 1099s, etc), that part could get built into the automatic filing system, too, and most people wouldn't be skating on (or losing) taxes or refunds.
This would make tax filing something only about, what, maybe 10% of the population would even have to care about. Some added percentage would keep doing it because they're cranks afraid the government is ripping them off, but even they would give up after a couple of years of getting nothing but frustrated paying for Turbo Tax Platinum Deluxe when they got zero out of it.
I've had several clients with bog-standard PCs being fed into various forms of video distribution systems and it actually did improve the reliability of all of them to be rebooted at least weekly.
You would think that running PowerPoint or some dumb JPG viewer in an infinite loop would go for months, and maybe sometimes it does, but there's a ton of opportunities for memory leaks and general desktop PC/OS/Windows unreliability if left unbooted for a long time.
True problem criminals usually wind up arrested in weeks or months at most, so no expungement is going to hide them. I mostly agree that saddling someone with a lifelong criminal history for a single instance of petty crime is a mistake, especially if complicates jobs or housing -- economics is a big driver towards further criminality if legitimate employment isn't an option.
The lack of jail space is a real issue. I interned in the legislature and was told by our state's prison director that the sentencing guidelines flexed based on some complex formula involving projected prison space. If you're going to sentence someone to prison, you have to have a place to actually put them. The relief valve was releasing inmates early, mostly males over 40 who were seen as unlikely to reoffend (single violent crime, committed early 20s, no history of discipline problems behind bars). The average length of incarceration for *all* crimes including murder was just 7 years, you take out a handful of people serving life or 30 year stretches and that number dropped a lot -- nobody stays in jail for long for any non-violent offense.
Prisons are fucking expensive to build and operate as a facility alone, let alone the costs of inmates individually (food, medical, etc). If you want them locked up you have to either be willing to put forward the money to run the institutions right or stop locking people up.
Frankly, start with the failure that is the war on drugs. Stop arresting anyone with less than an ounce of anything, whether its heroin or marijuana. Just don't bother. If you must, keep arresting actual dealers with kilos/pounds, but the ones in between an ounce and a kilo? Just confiscate the supply, the cartels/bosses will take care of sloppy dealers on their own.
I'd actually like to see freed up police effort on better patrolling/protection of residential areas and property crime enforcement. That's real quality of life stuff, but I don't have any illusions you can imprison away that problem. Interdiction and raising the risk level to property thieves should help drive down that number, as well as broadening the ability of people to defend their property with deadly force.
Whether the flight is "early" or "on time" is mostly driven by whether there is a gate available within their projected arrival time based on performance to the halfway point.
If the gate is occupied by an earlier flight, they slow down and arrive "on time" so there's a gate available.
If the gate is sitting empty because there's not enough flights to tax gate capacity, they arrive early. It's a huge PR win and it doesn't tax the ground services cleaning and prepping the plane for the next flight.
At a minimum, why not a scheduled task that reboots the display driving computer once a day so that at least you're not waiting for a memory error or some other long-run glitch hosing the system.
Even better is the software that generates the display would have a parallel watchdog process and they exchange "I'm OK" messages, and the watchdog communicates with the signage. If the "OK" messages stop, the signage just turns off, displays black, or some failsafe image stored internally.
Chances are, though, that some 27 year old Powerpoint guru is in charge of the content and the signage just accepts whatever HDMI or VGA signal it gets because the sign company couldn't keep up with every possible electronic image/data format people wanted to throw at it, so just give it a video input a computer will output and call it good.
The court schedules are clogged and everyone involved is fine with a bench trial, so the defense attorney asks for one.
The jail and prison system reports its expected population levels and how many new prisoners it can take in the next N days. They have to keep space for violent felons, so there's no space for small-time thieves.
Ergo, the judge doesn't sentence prison time and the system helps this whole process along with a non-custodial plea bargain. Better yet, "everyone" thinks that stayed sentences which are expunged after 2-3 years are better for the criminal and society (no bothersome record to impede jobs or housing), so that's what they get.
Incarcerating nearly 1% of your population is hard.
Most security companies desperately want to sound relevant when it comes to iOS, and they know that low-rent tech "journalists" are more than happy to play fast and loose with vulnerabilities that are a mile wide on Android but easy to avoid on iOS.
You can install Exchange server in less clicks of OK and Next than it would take for this "exploit" to work on iOS.
Apple does need to figure out its enterprise certificate system, though. It should be a 2 or 3 step process to install enterprise apps on a phone not already managed by that same organization.
I'm totally inclined to reject any censorship because it's a slippery slope and even the most well-intentioned censor has some kind of bias about what's acceptable speech and what should be censored. That, and usually sunlight is the best disinfectant -- bad/dumb ideas tend to wither under most examination.
That being said, I don't think humans have ever lived in an era where we were so capable of being exposed to so many bad ideas that could be so easily and effortlessly communicated, often with the intent of having them passed off as true *and* with so many of the people hearing bad ideas so blindly willing to reject anything they disagree with and accept anything if its a source they vaguely trust.
Pre-internet you had to either literally own a printing press (which was within reach of many past about 1800) or be willing to stand on the literal stump or literal soapbox in the actual town square to spread bad ideas.
Both of those things presented natural obstacles and self-censorship incentives.
The printing press cost some money, required supplies and physical effort to operate. You could say whatever you wanted, but unless you were able to distribute it totally anonymously (without anyone seeing you tack it to a tree or nail it to a wall), there was always a feedback risk if your ideas were dangerous -- the authorities, the mob, whoever could decide to stop you. And your distribution was seriously limited by how much you could materially reproduce and how far you could distribute physical things.
The town square? You might get shouted down, assaulted, or arrested depending on who you annoyed. Plus you had to go to the town square, and your audience had to be somewhat compliant with actually listening to you.
What makes now worse for all this is that we have companies whose financial interest is in literally reinforcing bad ideas for a profit. And it's trivial to be anonymous to the point where it takes a national security agency real effort to de-anonymize you and even then your bad ideas may be just rhetoric that is non-falsifiable even if it is factually unsupported, which loops back into the risks of censorship.
Mostly as I get older, I just think people are awful.
The cellular companies will probably decide they don't want to compete with fixed-line Internet services even if their 5G service is capable of doing it. They probably figure that most of the future of 5G is mobile devices and there's just more money to be made from keeping data caps high and charging extremely high rates for blurry and incoherent versions of "unlimited".
They could compete against fixed-line Internet if they wanted to, but then they would have to come with a scheme for lower prices/GB for fixed-line service to practically enforce higher prices for mobile users and some kind of PR scheme which caused it to make sense.
The Sony Trintron CRT was amazing and I don't regret the one I bought in 1992. But they never quite achieved that level of technical dominance in the flat screen era.
Mostly they were a company with some great individual technologies -- the various Walkman models were always pretty good, they had some decent VCRs but overall they never seemed to be the best at any one thing and I don't think they were ever considered a real high end brand.
I'd wager police leadership is sold on the idea that the plate readers pay for themselves through increased fine collections and civil forfeiture. If they can actually do some data intelligence driven detective work, it's just an added bonus but the real benefit is collecting money.
The cops *know* there all kinds of people out there with unpaid fines, but traditional methods are so inefficient (short of a mass issuance of bench warrants and a couple of dozen deputies spending a few days clearing them) they know they are essentially uncollectable without a lot of luck.
Having a machine that can more or less instantaneously tell you someone owes you money lets you rake it in. I'd wager places with this kind of automation probably also issue a lot more fines because they know that they're likely to collect.
I think the automation of enforcement like this is kind of awful and the incentives it creates and rewards make policing more onerous.
Would stuff like autopilot be considered less controversial?
I'd guess it would get promoted by the company as something other than quite such an autonomous self-driving platform.
Volvo (and I'm sure others, I've only been exposed to Volvo's system personally) has what amounts to a nearly self-driving system -- distance sensing cruise, lane centering, you very nearly don't need to "drive" to drive, yet there's not nearly the constant promotion/hostility to their system and other similar ones.
Even my lowly Subaru has really good optical distance sensing cruise and lane keeping (but not centering) assist and lane departure warnings.
My old Volvo's radar-based distance sensing cruise actually proved quite useful in a couple of bad snowstorms -- it could see the car in front of me better than I could.
You're not wrong that it's a bad idea, but I see it happen.
There's a lot of inexpensive (mostly 10 gig) switching out there that can route IP with minimal latency, or at least so little added latency it doesn't matter for a lot of ordinary storage traffic.
The other are data center expansions/contractions and some levels of same-campus, different-building high availability projects that work so long as you're able to route iSCSI traffic. I've also seen poor scaling decisions involving iSCSI subnets require additional IP space for node or storage unit expansion and no good way for devices to cross logical subnets without major reconfiguration/renumbering. Routing fixes this problem.
Places that scaled up quickly from poorly planned environments often end up implementing iSCSI VLANs but originally didn't and have storage devices they still need to talk to on existing routed networks. I've seen some dev/test environments that got built from old production parts "on the side" wind up needing to be merged in with production to finalize app upgrades or something.
Then there's just dysfunctional people/organizations. I've worked at places where either the storage guy or the network guy was just an asshole and wouldn't extend even marginal effort to help the other guy solve these problems.
Idiots get hired because there is more work (and potential revenue) than there are people employed to do it. The valuable work (interest, challenge, complexity, value) gets shoveled to the competent employees to keep them employees.
The marginal stuff isn't valuable enough to hire higher wage employees, so compromises are made to bring in "just OK" employees to do it, and to demonstrate their value they overreach and fuck things up.
We get a ton of pressure to buy Fortnite skins or other in-game items. So far the compromise is he can buy one item per month, and it has to be bought with his own PS currency cards that he buys with his own cash. One of the limiting factors is he has to get his own ass over to the Walgreens to buy the card.
He started in over wanting some other high-dollar item, headphones I think, and was angling for a parent subsidy. I took out a sheet of paper and did the math on what he spent on Fortnite add-ons and showed how he could actually buy it if he wasn't spending money on Fortnite skins. A light went on, but you could just see the weird, gambler-like cost-benefit analysis going on that said the headphones weren't as valuable to him as having the occasional Fortnite skin.
We make him save some portion of his allowance (which he earns through chores) and the money he makes shoveling for our neighbor, but are pretty liberal about allowing him to spend (or waste..) his spending money on whatever he thinks is useful. I think it staves off some obsession with not buying them and lets him feel in control and make his own choices. He's got a whole life ahead of him evaluating consumerist compulsions.
I agree with the oddly social aspect of the game. He is always playing with 2-3 kids he knows from school or the neighborhood, and the running conversation doesn't stop.
I sometimes wonder if some of this is a byproduct of kids lacking the free-range outside the house options we had as kids. Our moms were always booting us out of the house. And it's not like we were engaging in constructive activities out of the house, we road our bikes far from home, we played in/near the creek where it wouldn't have been hard to drown, and in middle school used to ride our bike to the river (the Mississippi river!) and climb on the undersides of bridges. We crossed the river on multiple bridge archways and catwalks, hugely dangerous in retrospect.
I will say as a parent that it's very difficult to allow Fortnite as a "sometimes" thing.
The kids themselves have zero self control, there is no self-management of game play. You're literally yelling at them to quit.
You can prevent them from playing at all, but you wind up with the ironic situation where the kids who they used to do stuff with in meat space aren't available because they're playing Fortnite.
The best we've been able to manage (short of a total, permanent ban) is making play contingent on grades and barring it on school nights. You get all As and Bs in school, you can play on weekends or when there's no school. My kid lost it for a month when his grades slipped, and there was constant angling for exceptions or complaining about how unfair it was.
The other strategy we haven't tried is trying to organize a multi-family Fortnite "holiday" where no kid can play. There's multiple challenges here, from the fact that 8th grade boys have a very amorphous and weak social circle in real life to other parents refusing to go along with it for various reasons -- "my kid doesn't have a problem", parents you don't know, and some percentage of parents who see Fortnite as the greatest babysitter ever.
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I wonder how well they are selling in corporate servers. It's a clusterfuck to mix AMD and Intel CPUs under VMware.
They already *know* which numbers belong to which networks, it's a necessary database that allows number portability so when someone calls a number they know which destination network to switch the call to.
All they need to do is use this database in reverse on calls entering their network to see if the ANI info for the call matches the network it's *supposed* to be coming from.
If ANI on an incoming call says it belongs to the ATT network but its entering from some carrier other than ATT, then it should be dropped as spoofed.
Carriers don't want to do this because they like selling trunks to low-rent VoIP providers who in turn will sell capacity to anyone with a credit card number.
It's also the surety of securities rate of return vs. the risk of loss on product innovation.
If you have $10 billion in capital, you can invest in securities and get 10% or you can risk some or all of it and possibly lose it all if your innovation efforts fail. Even if they succeed, you may only partly succeed and your innovation may still produce a rate of return lower than the securities market.
So you wind up being better off not innovating at all, and just investing your capital in securities markets. All large companies, especially those with a highly dominant product that needs little investment or innovation to maintain its dominance, are kind of at risk into turning into investment funds, since they can get a better rate of return investing than innovating.
Intel tried and failed at a number of things -- 5G, big screen TVs (they had some kind of micro-mirror design they were working on when internal rear projection was still a thing), and maybe a number of other product lines.
But at least Intel *tried* -- has Apple done anything innovative? They can barely muster the R&D money to refresh their non-phone products, and the phone feature pipeline is a trickle of features each year, with a total stranglehold on the platform to make sure their long-term "innovation" plans aren't screwed up.
The only thing that seems to help in these situations is really powerful and compelling competition. In theory, AMD provides this but despite the hoopla over their new CPUs, I don't really see the rank-and-file volume buyers of CPUs doing anything that involves switching to AMD, often because the slight architecture difference is a big problem in virtualization environments. It's sort of similar to Samsung/Apple, too, where even though Samsung phones may have superior hardware, the lack of complete compatibility (different OS, etc) isn't enough to be real competition for most Apple buyers.
It might be argued that this is similar to what took out the Big 3 car-makers in the US. Stagnant product lines and little automotive innovation until buyers found their small, foreign competitors products not just more fuel efficient but more durable and better made.
I wonder if any cities were ever clever enough to require that Google fiber installations be both durable enough to last 20 years without major physical installation maintenance and a salable asset should Google decide they no longer want to run the project.
My guess is no, they all saw this project as a massive savior and that Google would build it to last forever, because Google and Internet.
It's hard to see a Volvo brand as less expensive than a VW-branded vehicle, unless they're trying to strip it of Volvo-like (near) luxury in an attempt to cut costs so that it's not more expensive than an actual Volvo.
It's always amazing to me that the company that gave us the 240DL, the official vehicle of democratic socialism, is now mostly a luxury car company.
My guess is she's better than you think. It's probably a real job with real responsibilities that has a really high income. And if she was half-smart, she'd also know that a black female executive who's actually good at her job is worth a giant pay premium to many companies for the black and female part.
It seems kind of ironic, but so many companies need/want to virtue signal their ethnically diverse makeup that they're fairly desperate to retain and promote female, and especially black female, executives, and will pay premiums to keep the ones that are average-or-better in their positions.
My wife (who isn't black) actually squeezed more money out of her employer for this reason. Her boss actually told her that female executive recruiting and retention was a big deal to global management ("You're actually on a high-value, high achievers list at corporate in Dublin."), and despite getting a bunch of unrequested deferred compensation thrown at her, she also asked for a big raise and they didn't even negotiate, they just gave it to her.
My guess is Peggy Alford doesn't give a shit whether some right wing cranks think she's only where she's at because she's female or black, she's too busy cashing checks and figuring out her new company-supplied Mercedes.
It's cross subsidies within a channel family, like ESPN subsidizing ESPN-3 or MTV subsidizing VH-1 Classic 3 or something.
I think mostly these channels exist because the "root" channel is too valuable for a cable system to lose, so the root channel owner can strong arm the cable system to carry the lesser channels, too.
I think the original idea was to grab up channel space when cable systems had more limited channel capacity, effectively blocking competitors and extending the brand. Now that cable channel capacity is expended via digital encoding, its probably more about branding and additional capacity during large-scale events.
It's not really a "subsidy" in the traditional sense, since the channels are all owned by one company and the company itself is profitable, but the channel wouldn't exist if it didn't have a powerful parent channel to force it onto the cable system. It's not profitable enough from an advertising/carriage fee perspective to actually support its production costs -- to the extent that it has production costs and isn't just running tape delayed content from another channel or other content they already own.
I don't know how you get rid of this, really, as long as you have cable systems willing to play along to keep the likes of ESPN. My guess is the relationship is so symbiotic now that cable systems actually don't mind so long as the total carriage agreement works financially. Bundling keeps cable systems alive by preventing a lot of individual channels from being ala carte, and channel owners just extend it to new "cable-like" streaming services.
The IRS audits people for almost no reason. I got audited 35 years ago when I made near zero money and no discrepancies in my tax filings with reported payroll income. What a waste of time and resources. I was 25 years old and had filed my own taxes since I was 16 years old.
The audit challenges of the very rich are endless. Just one reported source of their taxable income could take a team of forensic accountants and lawyers weeks to validate, they could have dozens or hundreds of these. There's almost no way they could truly audit any 10 rich people in a year, let alone a million of them.
It's not a nation *state*, but arguably (and extremely loosely), you could argue that a "nation" is a pretty ambiguous concept that describes a grouping of people sharing some commonality, and there's no logical reason why race couldn't be a valid criteria for membership whatever nation you're defining.
So in theory, you could be a white nationalist and it would be a logical statement. Just like you could be a black nationalist, a Catholic nationalist, etc.
Audit targeting is also driven by congress. There was a thing on the local NPR station (MPR) today where they were talking about some kind of family/child credit, and how the Republicans (mostly) are super wound up that people who don't qualify are getting it, and there's some law that requires the IRS to audit it.
So they plug in the variables and send automated audit forms to hundreds of thousands of people over family/child credits. The real kicker is that audit compliance is a paper-and-pencil kind of operation, and it ties up a ton of people resources to process the audit compliance they get from people who were audited.
Guess who doesn't get audited? That's right, the rich guys, because the same congress has cut funding to the IRS and the IRS is so busy dealing with mandated audit compliance they don't have the manpower to go after traditional audit targets as much.
Personally I think not having the IRS run online tax filing is idiotic in the extreme. The efficiency increase alone ought to pay for itself.
I might even go one step further and just have the government just automatically file for basic W-2 employees and send them either a bill or a refund automatically, don't even bother with the whole "filing" kabuki theater. Filing would be optional if you had other income or deductions you wanted to report or claim. Since most of that is already automatically reported to the IRS (mortgage interest, bank interest, 1099s, etc), that part could get built into the automatic filing system, too, and most people wouldn't be skating on (or losing) taxes or refunds.
This would make tax filing something only about, what, maybe 10% of the population would even have to care about. Some added percentage would keep doing it because they're cranks afraid the government is ripping them off, but even they would give up after a couple of years of getting nothing but frustrated paying for Turbo Tax Platinum Deluxe when they got zero out of it.
I've had several clients with bog-standard PCs being fed into various forms of video distribution systems and it actually did improve the reliability of all of them to be rebooted at least weekly.
You would think that running PowerPoint or some dumb JPG viewer in an infinite loop would go for months, and maybe sometimes it does, but there's a ton of opportunities for memory leaks and general desktop PC/OS/Windows unreliability if left unbooted for a long time.
True problem criminals usually wind up arrested in weeks or months at most, so no expungement is going to hide them. I mostly agree that saddling someone with a lifelong criminal history for a single instance of petty crime is a mistake, especially if complicates jobs or housing -- economics is a big driver towards further criminality if legitimate employment isn't an option.
The lack of jail space is a real issue. I interned in the legislature and was told by our state's prison director that the sentencing guidelines flexed based on some complex formula involving projected prison space. If you're going to sentence someone to prison, you have to have a place to actually put them. The relief valve was releasing inmates early, mostly males over 40 who were seen as unlikely to reoffend (single violent crime, committed early 20s, no history of discipline problems behind bars). The average length of incarceration for *all* crimes including murder was just 7 years, you take out a handful of people serving life or 30 year stretches and that number dropped a lot -- nobody stays in jail for long for any non-violent offense.
Prisons are fucking expensive to build and operate as a facility alone, let alone the costs of inmates individually (food, medical, etc). If you want them locked up you have to either be willing to put forward the money to run the institutions right or stop locking people up.
Frankly, start with the failure that is the war on drugs. Stop arresting anyone with less than an ounce of anything, whether its heroin or marijuana. Just don't bother. If you must, keep arresting actual dealers with kilos/pounds, but the ones in between an ounce and a kilo? Just confiscate the supply, the cartels/bosses will take care of sloppy dealers on their own.
I'd actually like to see freed up police effort on better patrolling/protection of residential areas and property crime enforcement. That's real quality of life stuff, but I don't have any illusions you can imprison away that problem. Interdiction and raising the risk level to property thieves should help drive down that number, as well as broadening the ability of people to defend their property with deadly force.
Whether the flight is "early" or "on time" is mostly driven by whether there is a gate available within their projected arrival time based on performance to the halfway point.
If the gate is occupied by an earlier flight, they slow down and arrive "on time" so there's a gate available.
If the gate is sitting empty because there's not enough flights to tax gate capacity, they arrive early. It's a huge PR win and it doesn't tax the ground services cleaning and prepping the plane for the next flight.
At a minimum, why not a scheduled task that reboots the display driving computer once a day so that at least you're not waiting for a memory error or some other long-run glitch hosing the system.
Even better is the software that generates the display would have a parallel watchdog process and they exchange "I'm OK" messages, and the watchdog communicates with the signage. If the "OK" messages stop, the signage just turns off, displays black, or some failsafe image stored internally.
Chances are, though, that some 27 year old Powerpoint guru is in charge of the content and the signage just accepts whatever HDMI or VGA signal it gets because the sign company couldn't keep up with every possible electronic image/data format people wanted to throw at it, so just give it a video input a computer will output and call it good.
The court schedules are clogged and everyone involved is fine with a bench trial, so the defense attorney asks for one.
The jail and prison system reports its expected population levels and how many new prisoners it can take in the next N days. They have to keep space for violent felons, so there's no space for small-time thieves.
Ergo, the judge doesn't sentence prison time and the system helps this whole process along with a non-custodial plea bargain. Better yet, "everyone" thinks that stayed sentences which are expunged after 2-3 years are better for the criminal and society (no bothersome record to impede jobs or housing), so that's what they get.
Incarcerating nearly 1% of your population is hard.
Most security companies desperately want to sound relevant when it comes to iOS, and they know that low-rent tech "journalists" are more than happy to play fast and loose with vulnerabilities that are a mile wide on Android but easy to avoid on iOS.
You can install Exchange server in less clicks of OK and Next than it would take for this "exploit" to work on iOS.
Apple does need to figure out its enterprise certificate system, though. It should be a 2 or 3 step process to install enterprise apps on a phone not already managed by that same organization.
I'm totally inclined to reject any censorship because it's a slippery slope and even the most well-intentioned censor has some kind of bias about what's acceptable speech and what should be censored. That, and usually sunlight is the best disinfectant -- bad/dumb ideas tend to wither under most examination.
That being said, I don't think humans have ever lived in an era where we were so capable of being exposed to so many bad ideas that could be so easily and effortlessly communicated, often with the intent of having them passed off as true *and* with so many of the people hearing bad ideas so blindly willing to reject anything they disagree with and accept anything if its a source they vaguely trust.
Pre-internet you had to either literally own a printing press (which was within reach of many past about 1800) or be willing to stand on the literal stump or literal soapbox in the actual town square to spread bad ideas.
Both of those things presented natural obstacles and self-censorship incentives.
The printing press cost some money, required supplies and physical effort to operate. You could say whatever you wanted, but unless you were able to distribute it totally anonymously (without anyone seeing you tack it to a tree or nail it to a wall), there was always a feedback risk if your ideas were dangerous -- the authorities, the mob, whoever could decide to stop you. And your distribution was seriously limited by how much you could materially reproduce and how far you could distribute physical things.
The town square? You might get shouted down, assaulted, or arrested depending on who you annoyed. Plus you had to go to the town square, and your audience had to be somewhat compliant with actually listening to you.
What makes now worse for all this is that we have companies whose financial interest is in literally reinforcing bad ideas for a profit. And it's trivial to be anonymous to the point where it takes a national security agency real effort to de-anonymize you and even then your bad ideas may be just rhetoric that is non-falsifiable even if it is factually unsupported, which loops back into the risks of censorship.
Mostly as I get older, I just think people are awful.
The cellular companies will probably decide they don't want to compete with fixed-line Internet services even if their 5G service is capable of doing it. They probably figure that most of the future of 5G is mobile devices and there's just more money to be made from keeping data caps high and charging extremely high rates for blurry and incoherent versions of "unlimited".
They could compete against fixed-line Internet if they wanted to, but then they would have to come with a scheme for lower prices/GB for fixed-line service to practically enforce higher prices for mobile users and some kind of PR scheme which caused it to make sense.
The Sony Trintron CRT was amazing and I don't regret the one I bought in 1992. But they never quite achieved that level of technical dominance in the flat screen era.
Mostly they were a company with some great individual technologies -- the various Walkman models were always pretty good, they had some decent VCRs but overall they never seemed to be the best at any one thing and I don't think they were ever considered a real high end brand.
I'd wager police leadership is sold on the idea that the plate readers pay for themselves through increased fine collections and civil forfeiture. If they can actually do some data intelligence driven detective work, it's just an added bonus but the real benefit is collecting money.
The cops *know* there all kinds of people out there with unpaid fines, but traditional methods are so inefficient (short of a mass issuance of bench warrants and a couple of dozen deputies spending a few days clearing them) they know they are essentially uncollectable without a lot of luck.
Having a machine that can more or less instantaneously tell you someone owes you money lets you rake it in. I'd wager places with this kind of automation probably also issue a lot more fines because they know that they're likely to collect.
I think the automation of enforcement like this is kind of awful and the incentives it creates and rewards make policing more onerous.
Would stuff like autopilot be considered less controversial?
I'd guess it would get promoted by the company as something other than quite such an autonomous self-driving platform.
Volvo (and I'm sure others, I've only been exposed to Volvo's system personally) has what amounts to a nearly self-driving system -- distance sensing cruise, lane centering, you very nearly don't need to "drive" to drive, yet there's not nearly the constant promotion/hostility to their system and other similar ones.
Even my lowly Subaru has really good optical distance sensing cruise and lane keeping (but not centering) assist and lane departure warnings.
My old Volvo's radar-based distance sensing cruise actually proved quite useful in a couple of bad snowstorms -- it could see the car in front of me better than I could.
You're not wrong that it's a bad idea, but I see it happen.
There's a lot of inexpensive (mostly 10 gig) switching out there that can route IP with minimal latency, or at least so little added latency it doesn't matter for a lot of ordinary storage traffic.
The other are data center expansions/contractions and some levels of same-campus, different-building high availability projects that work so long as you're able to route iSCSI traffic. I've also seen poor scaling decisions involving iSCSI subnets require additional IP space for node or storage unit expansion and no good way for devices to cross logical subnets without major reconfiguration/renumbering. Routing fixes this problem.
Places that scaled up quickly from poorly planned environments often end up implementing iSCSI VLANs but originally didn't and have storage devices they still need to talk to on existing routed networks. I've seen some dev/test environments that got built from old production parts "on the side" wind up needing to be merged in with production to finalize app upgrades or something.
Then there's just dysfunctional people/organizations. I've worked at places where either the storage guy or the network guy was just an asshole and wouldn't extend even marginal effort to help the other guy solve these problems.
Idiots get hired because there is more work (and potential revenue) than there are people employed to do it. The valuable work (interest, challenge, complexity, value) gets shoveled to the competent employees to keep them employees.
The marginal stuff isn't valuable enough to hire higher wage employees, so compromises are made to bring in "just OK" employees to do it, and to demonstrate their value they overreach and fuck things up.
At least this is how it works where I am.
We get a ton of pressure to buy Fortnite skins or other in-game items. So far the compromise is he can buy one item per month, and it has to be bought with his own PS currency cards that he buys with his own cash. One of the limiting factors is he has to get his own ass over to the Walgreens to buy the card.
He started in over wanting some other high-dollar item, headphones I think, and was angling for a parent subsidy. I took out a sheet of paper and did the math on what he spent on Fortnite add-ons and showed how he could actually buy it if he wasn't spending money on Fortnite skins. A light went on, but you could just see the weird, gambler-like cost-benefit analysis going on that said the headphones weren't as valuable to him as having the occasional Fortnite skin.
We make him save some portion of his allowance (which he earns through chores) and the money he makes shoveling for our neighbor, but are pretty liberal about allowing him to spend (or waste..) his spending money on whatever he thinks is useful. I think it staves off some obsession with not buying them and lets him feel in control and make his own choices. He's got a whole life ahead of him evaluating consumerist compulsions.
I agree with the oddly social aspect of the game. He is always playing with 2-3 kids he knows from school or the neighborhood, and the running conversation doesn't stop.
I sometimes wonder if some of this is a byproduct of kids lacking the free-range outside the house options we had as kids. Our moms were always booting us out of the house. And it's not like we were engaging in constructive activities out of the house, we road our bikes far from home, we played in/near the creek where it wouldn't have been hard to drown, and in middle school used to ride our bike to the river (the Mississippi river!) and climb on the undersides of bridges. We crossed the river on multiple bridge archways and catwalks, hugely dangerous in retrospect.
I will say as a parent that it's very difficult to allow Fortnite as a "sometimes" thing.
The kids themselves have zero self control, there is no self-management of game play. You're literally yelling at them to quit.
You can prevent them from playing at all, but you wind up with the ironic situation where the kids who they used to do stuff with in meat space aren't available because they're playing Fortnite.
The best we've been able to manage (short of a total, permanent ban) is making play contingent on grades and barring it on school nights. You get all As and Bs in school, you can play on weekends or when there's no school. My kid lost it for a month when his grades slipped, and there was constant angling for exceptions or complaining about how unfair it was.
The other strategy we haven't tried is trying to organize a multi-family Fortnite "holiday" where no kid can play. There's multiple challenges here, from the fact that 8th grade boys have a very amorphous and weak social circle in real life to other parents refusing to go along with it for various reasons -- "my kid doesn't have a problem", parents you don't know, and some percentage of parents who see Fortnite as the greatest babysitter ever.