And I don't mean countersuits in response to another company or individual suing them for patent infringement. I mean, has Google ever found someone violating one of their patents, and been the first to file an infringement lawsuit?
There's plenty not to like and to worry about with Google. But by my recollection, acting like a patent troll isn't one of them. If Google is trying to get a patent for an already-existing invention, then it's far more likely they applied for it just in case the USPTO was stupid enough to grant it. That way they would have the patent instead of some patent troll who could then sue Google for it. $10,000 for a patent application is cheap insurance against a patent lawsuit which could cost $millions to defend against.
That's not what happens. In the early 1900s a few billionaires controlled large industries and artificially kept wages low. Henry Ford offered a substantially higher wage at his factories. Those wages were closer to the actual productivity of the workers, thus creating a feedback loop where the workers were able to afford the cars his factories were producing, and the increased sales produced more work for them and more wealth for Ford. (If workers are already being paid the right amount for their productivity and you try to increase their wages even higher, you get what happened to Greece a few years ago.)
In other words, the market wants wages to correctly reflect each worker's actual productivity because the economy is most efficient when that's true. It takes active work - either government corruption or collusion among all businessmen or both - to thwart that and make the middle class disappear. And if they succeed at that, it just creates an economic inefficiency. That means there's an opportunity for someone new to step in, pay a fair wage, and become a new billionaire while creating a new middle class.
The doomsday scenario you describe only exists in third world countries where the wealthy tightly control the country via bribing government officials. This artificially stunts the country's per capita productivity (usually down around $5k-$10k per person per year). But these wealthy people are more interested in being big fishes in little ponds, so they maintain their grip on the country even though it means their wealth is stunted at less than it could be. It can't happen in developed countries with higher per capita productivity because doing so would reduce per capita productivity and thus the size of the country's GDP. Meaning the wealthy class would lose wealth in the process (rather than being capped at an artificially low mount). At which point they will do everything in their power to fix the middle class and get people jobs, so they can start buying stuff being produced in these automated factories, so they can become wealthy(ier) again.
In which case, they could have simply hashed the SSN on receipt and stored the hash.
SSNs are 9-digit numbers. So even if you hash them, it only takes a rainbow table with 1 billion entries (8 GB using 2 billion long ints) to reverse it. That's small enough to fit in RAM on a modern computer. Salting would help, but I imagine whatever info was stolen during this hack was what would've been used to generate the salt as well. SSNs were never designed to be used as secure personal identification numbers, and it's difficult to try to make them secure for that purpose.
The key thing to understand here is that credit reports don't make it harder for you to get loans. If you have no credit, lenders assume you are as risky as someone with bad credit. So credit reports can only help you, not hurt you - i.e. the whole point of having credit is to demonstrate to lenders that you are not a risk and will pay their money back. This means the credit agencies could've had you generate a RSA key pair, you send them the public key, and they encrypted all your credit info with your public key (and their public key) before storing it.
Any new info added to your credit report (including corrections or deletions of previous info) could simply be encrypted with both public keys and appended to your credit report.
If the encrypted data were stolen, it'd be useless without your private key. And since having a good credit report helps you while having no credit report is the same as bad credit, it is in the individual's best interest to safeguard their private key.
Likewise, the credit agency's private key would be their lifeblood. If someone stole it along with all the encrypted data, they could supplant the credit agency and offer to act as a credit agency themselves at a lower price. So the credit agency would take extreme measures to safeguard their private key (safeguarding a single key being easier than safeguarding an entire database).
If you applied for a loan at the bank, the bank would submit a request and payment to the credit agency. The credit agency would send you your encrypted credit report, you would use your private key to partially decrypt it, send it back to them, and they would use their private key to completely decrypt it and send your decrypted credit report to the bank. And the bank could approve/deny your loan.
Unfortunately since this method requires the consent of both the credit agency and the individual to generate a credit report, it means the credit agency would be unable to make money selling your information to marketers and junk mailers. They would only be able to make money selling credit reports to lenders. Which is why they don't do it. It's more profitable for them to keep information on you in unencrypted plaintext that they can sell to marketers.
The phone manufacturer or carrier got paid to include those apps on your phone. So in a way you're benefiting from it via a lower phone price, though it can be hard to tell with how quickly they depreciate.
To get rid of it, you gotta root the phone. To get rid of the Google apps (which are linked to the Google Play Store), you have to root the phone and install a vanilla version of Android compiled straight from Google's open source, and don't install the Google Apps bundle. As you probably guessed though, this means you give up access to the Google Play Store and any apps which you may have purchased through it.
My suggestion would be to make a law where the manufacturer or reseller (carrier) must provide warranty service for as long as software not essential to the device's operation remains on it. So if they want to get paid to put Facebook on the phone and make it impossible to delete forever, then they need to provide warranty service for the phone forever. Basically if they want to behave as if they still partially own the phone, then they need to continue to provide warranty service for it.
We haven't had two Cat 4 hurricanes hit for more than a century. The increase in water temp is increasing the power of the storms, and we should expect this to continue. That doesn't mean every storm will be Cat 4/5 or that every season will be worse than the last. Just that the frequency of high-power storms will increase. Again, we haven't had landfall of two Cat 4 storms in 100 years, so Harvey and Irma are definitely unusual.
The last time two Cat 4+ storms made landfall in the North Atlantic was 2008. Gustav hit Cuba as a Cat 4. And Ike hit Great Inagua Island and Grand Turk Island as a Cat 4. (Paloma hit Cat 4 just south of Cuba, but dropped to a Cat 2 before landfall.)
If you mean landfall in the U.S., well the U.S. lies at the extreme northern edge of hurricane territory. So you're basically just counting outliers if you're only counting U.S. hurricanes. They're too infrequent and random to draw reliable stats from. With modern satellite coverage and flights into major storms to get precise measurements, there's no reason not to use the entire database of every storm that forms in the North Atlantic.
And those trying to tie hurricanes in with climate change invariably focus on the North Atlantic because that's the storm basin whose recent history fits their desired narrative. Meanwhile, storm frequency in the East Pacific is flat. The West Pacific is mostly flat with a recent slight downward trend. The South Pacific is down, as is the North Indian Ocean.
Extradition is intended to prevent someone committing a crime while in a country's jurisdiction and then running away to a foreign country to escape answering for it.
That's exactly what happened here, except the order of the crime and fleeing are reversed. He committed the crimes remotely - he "fled" first, then (allegedly) committed the crimes.
There's a concept in common law states called standing. The crime was (remotely) committed in the U.S. The injured party is in the U.S. The (purported) criminal is in the UK. The injured party has no standing (right to sue) in the UK. Consequently, the correct venue to hold the trial is in the U.S. This is exactly the type of situation extradition treaties were set up to address.
If what he did was legal in the UK, then it'd be a different story. And I'd completely understand if the UK refused to extradite for that reason. Likewise if the UK felt there was insufficient evidence against him, then I'd understand if they denied the extradition request (c.f. New Zealand and Kim Dotcom). But if he'd be subject to trial in the UK if he had committed these acts against a UK citizen or UK government, then there's really no reason not to honor the U.S.' extradition request. I suppose the UK could grant the U.S. government standing and the broad right to sue UK citizens in UK courts for violating UK law outside the UK against U.S. citizens and interests. But I think UK citizens would prefer extradition to that.
Because it makes it completely clear who is actually paying the taxes - the customers. A tax on revenue is otherwise known as a sales tax.
Companies don't pay corporate taxes. It gets passed on to customers as higher prices, to employees as lower wages, and to owners/stockholders as reduced dividends. You see, companies are just paper entities - they don't really exist. They're just a line a bunch of people (owners/stockholders and employees) draw around themselves so they can declare "we are working together." All the productivity, all the innovation, all the decisions are made by those people, not "the company". The company is just an inanimate banner, a flag they hold over their operations.
So you can't really tax a company. That's like impounding a car for assisting in a bank robbery, or sentencing a PC to prison for being used in a hack. Losing those items just turns into an additional financial expense for the people who used to own them. Likewise, corporate taxes are just additional financial expenses for the people involved with a company - owners/stockholders, employees, and customers.
Once you realize this, you realize how stupid it is to have a million different taxes for a million different things. It's a horribly inefficient way to collect tax revenue. The most efficient method would be to have a single tax which you assess against all people. If you believe in progressive taxation, then the obvious tax to keep is the income tax. Pretty much all other taxes* can be eliminated with no effect on the economy or tax revenue, other than vastly reducing the amount of money wasted on collecting taxes and forcing people/businesses to keep track of a million different taxes.
* (Behavior-modifying taxes would still be useful since their primary goal is not to collect revenue for the government. e.g. Fuel taxes to encourage energy efficiency, property taxes to prevent speculators from holding on to fallow land which could otherwise be put to much better use.)
This also avoids the hypocrisy of saying you believe in no taxation without representation, then simultaneously wanting to tax corporations while believing they should have no role in government.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with using a timestamp, provided (1) the timestamp has sufficient resolution to make a brute force attack unfeasible. Timestamps are used in some pseudo-random number generators - you use something like the last 8 digits of the exact nanosecond a random number was requested. And (2) Equifax only stores the hash so it can't be reverse-engineered if their password database is stolen.
Unfortunately, it looks like their timestamp only has one minute resolution, meaning there are only 1440 possible timestamps every day. Which means it'll be almost trivial for a identity thief to brute force based on when they lost their ability to use your credit, and what time of day you were likely to be awake and free to request the credit freeze. And even if they're hashing their password database, a hacker who steals it and their hashing algorithm will be able to generate a rainbow table with just a half million entries per year.
There's actually a mathematical difference between systems which allow only up-votes, vs systems which allow both up- and down-votes. With an up-vote only system, if a sufficient number of people think a post is insightful or interesting, it ranks high.
People mistakenly think an up/down-vote system results in fairer results. Not necessarily. It gives results which conform to the group's biases. The problem arises when the population of people likely to down-vote a post is highly disproportionate. The example I always used (to avoid political bias) is Linux vs Windows. Windows has approximately 100x more users than Linux. Imagine there's a search engine which allows users to vote search results up or down based on how useful they are.
Say a search for "how to partition a drive" gives a bunch of results for partitioning in Windows, and one result for partition in Linux. Say 1% of all users are idiots who will unfairly down-vote something just because they don't like it. So the up/down votes work properly for the Windows results. But the Linux result? Well, the 1% of Windows users who down-vote it because it isn't relevant to them (even though it's their own fault for not specifying "Windows" in the search) will exceed the number of up-votes it gets from Linux users unless every single Linux user who finds it useful up-votes it. And as a result the Linux site will be ranked as not useful, even though it's incredibly useful for Linux users (almost all of them up-voted it).
So an up/down-vote system ends up more representative of the population, but it also ends up reflecting the population's pre-existing biases. Basically it'll be rife with confirmation bias unless all the users are diligent about not down-voting just because they disagree.
The browser is not meant to be any playground where UI elements are moved and changed around.
On the contrary, the only reason I still use Firefox part of the time is because way back around version 2 or 3 (back when it had the configurable drag and drop UI), I took some time to configure it to my liking. When I upgraded computers, I used Firefox's built-in backup utility to backup bookmarks but didn't uncheck any options. That's when I accidentally discovered that it also backed up my UI configuration as well.
For about a decade now, I've been restoring this backup and it's been mostly successful at undoing many of the pointless UI changes Mozilla has been making to turn FF into a clone of Chrome. Being able to remove or change around UI elements is exactly what browsers need - so long as it's the user who is in control of these changes. Not some faceless designer who decides which changes to make and forces it onto all users.
Slashdot started going downhill in the early 2000s, about the time its popularity started to really grow. That's when I noticed posts which made sound mathematical or statistical points were more frequently being downvoted simply because they supported politically unpopular positions (usually downvoted by people on the left, though that may have just been a consequence of most people on the Internet back then being left-leaning). The shift to the right in recent years hasn't helped (except at driving slashdot back towards center, though it seems to have overshot). But the drop in average intelligence level here happened over a decade ago.
(And yes I know my ID isn't that old. My co-workers told me about this site in 1998, and I browsed it as anonymous coward for many years because I was a paranoid about my privacy back then.)
This actually ties in with one of the points those on the right have been making recently - that SJWs trying to squelch free expression is detrimental to society. The slashdot moderation guidelines do a pretty good job summarizing the real goal of diversity:
Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check.
We're all trying to learn as much as we can on this journey of life. And by definition, learning requires you to see or hear something you didn't know about before. So censoring or punishing people simply for expressing opinions which are unusual or unpopular decreases the opportunity for learning, because you've reduced the diversity of minds thinking about a problem. Democracy gets its strength from millions of different minds viewing a problem in millions of different ways coming up with millions of different possible solutions. That scattershot approach has a much better chance of finding a real solution than a system where diversity of opinion has been eliminated in favor of advocating the One Approved Line of Thinking.
If you have never modded up a post which you personally disagree with but thought made insightful or interesting points which you never would have thought of on your own, you are part of the reason slashdot has gone downhill.
This is a perfect example of the failure of government regulation in health care. If this had been a purely capitalistic system (not that I'm advocating pure capitalism for health care), anyone could manufacture an epi-pen type device. Once word got out that Mylan's product was failing and they weren't doing anything to fix the defect, people would stop buying them and switch to a competitor's product which was reported to be reliable on the net. Mylan's reputation would be tarnished as producing unreliable health products, and they possibly could have gone bankrupt as people stopped buying their other products as well based on their poor reputation.
The reason there's no competition and Mylan sells the only epi-pen on the market is because FDA regulations have made it prohibitively expensive for a competitor to introduce an alternative into the market. Since it's the FDA's fault there's only one product on the market, the onus is on the FDA to make sure it is reliable and effective. They failed to do that in a timely manner.
Their site is even worse than Krebs points out. I followed a link in a CNN article to the Equifax site. If I enter certain personal info, it purports to tell me if I'm affected by the hack and says it will give me the option to sign up for TrustedID Premier.
I put in my last name, a few digits of my SSN, and passed the captcha. It took me directly to a page thanking me for signing up for TrustedID Premier. It never told me if I was affected. Since others are getting the site to (sorta) work, I'm not sure if it was the fact that I was in incognito mode, my ad blocker, or my various script blockers which caused the site to malfunction. It sure as h*ll better not have signed me up for TrustedID Premier.
The fraudster just calls up and says they forgot the PIN. The credit agency then asks him/her information which only you should know to confirm identity, then lifts the freeze or resets the PIN. Still, it is (or was) the best way to protect your credit. Unfortunately, the information they use to confirm your identity is probably what's been stolen in this hack. So whoever stole it can lift any freeze you put on your credit.
So if you cherry-pick your data from just the one storm basin which fits your preconceived expectations and ignore all the others, yes hurricanes have been increasing in frequency and intensity.
You are the product. The customers are the banks, companies, and landlords from whom you wish to borrow money or collateral (like a leased car or apartment).
And getting rid of the credit agencies won't have the effect most people seem to think it will. Lenders won't magically assume everyone is credit-worthy if there's no way to check people's credit. They're going to assume everyone is not credit-worthy. In other words, getting rid of credit reports won't make it easier for people with poor credit to borrow money. Nothing will change for people with poor credit. The only difference will be for people who had good credit - all the banks, companies, and landlords will assume everyone has bad credit, and everything will be priced accordingly.
Unless you can prove you have enough money in the bank to cover the loan or collateral. So only the 1% would be able to borrow cheaply. The 99% would have to pay the exorbitant interest rates formerly reserved only for people with poor credit. That is the benefit the credit agencies provide you - giving you (if you're fiscally responsible) access to cheap loans without you having to keep enough money in the bank to immediately pay back the entire loan at any instant. But because people don't like being denied a loan, somehow this default base state (unable to get a loan because the lender doesn't know if they can trust you) got twisted around in people's minds into being a negative. It's not a negative; it's the neutral state. And being able to get a loan after a credit check is not a neutral, it's a positive.
I suspect maintenance costs are going to kill this idea. Ask anyone who owns a boat (power or sail) used in the ocean. You spend almost as much time maintaining it as you do using it, and replacing corroded parts is one of your biggest expenses. Even if they made the rotors out of a corrosion-resistant material like fiberglass, the fact that you need to rotate them means a lot of precision metal parts which are going to corrode and wear unless on a strict maintenance schedule. (Yes propellers spin, but they're fully submerged so you can use sacrificial anodes to protect them from corrosion. Something up in the air with droplets of saltwater mist on it is going to corrode almost overnight.)
It's the same problem the NS Savannah encountered. Making it nuclear power dropped its fuel costs to near zero. But the increased labor required to operate and maintain the nuclear reactor ended up making it more expensive than a cargo ship powered with fuel oil.
Any other studio wouldn't try this because of the potential backlash from upset consumers. Disney thinks they can get away with it because kids are going to bug their parents into getting a subscription so they can watch the Disney stuff, principles be damned. And I suspect they're right.
Copyright law gives content creators exclusive control over how their work is distributed. I agree that it's too much control, but government anti-trust law is powerless here because it's a right granted by the government in the first place.
We need to modify copyright law if we want to change it. But need I remind you that Disney is the company who successfully managed to shove life + 90 years copyright duration down our collective throats to protect Mickey Mouse.
I've always wondered. What mechanisms are in place to prevent someone taking high-res photos of their ballot while voting, going home and duplicating large quantities of them, mark the candidates they want to win, and passing them off to co-conspirators who palm them and drop them into the ballot box at the same time they're dropping in their real ballot?
The allure of paper ballots always seemed to me to be based on fear and ignorance. Supporting an old system not because it's actually superior, but because you fear the problems and challenges a new system, while you're comfortable with the problems in the old system.
Between two-factor cryptography, hashes, and blockchains, it seems to me there's gotta be some way to combine these into a digital method of tallying votes which can't be manipulated.
It looks like the person(s) who filed the complaint created a fake law firm site using info stolen from a real law firm's site. It wasn't good enough to pass a 5 minute sniff test, but apparently was good enough to pass Amazon's 1-click non-test. Likely the person(s) filed the fake complaint (and set up the fake website) using an anonymous email account.
The onus in these cases has to be on Amazon to expend the resources to properly vet these claims before acting on them. If there were viable competition between marketplaces, this wouldn't be a problem. Sellers would abandon the flaky/lazy marketplace and move to ones which treated them better. But Amazon dominates online sales, much like eBay dominates online auctions.
This is the whole reason we revolted against walled garden online services (AOL, Prodigy, GEnie, MSN) in the 1990s in favor of the open Internet. Having a handful of companies acting as gatekeepers just presents too much opportunity for abuse. When Amazon first started, I was hoping multiple online retailers like it would blossom and we'd rely on price search engines (like Pricegrabber) to invite competition between all online retailers. Unfortunately that hasn't really happened, and if anything the public seems to be gravitating back towards the walled gardens (iOS iTunes, Google Play on Android).
His TV (mechanical scanning) is analogous to Nokia's smartphone. Technically it was the first smartphone (or Blackberry was depending on how you want to define it). But it was very different from the smartphones we use today. LG introduced the first touchscreen-only smartphone, and Apple had the most initial success with it. Likewise, every mass-produced TV until the advent of plasma and LCD flatscreen TVs was based on the electronic scanning pioneered by Farnsworth.
The mean can be elevated by vastly improving speeds to a select few customers. e.g. If 10 people have service with an average (mean) speed of 10 Mbps, and you upgrade just one of them to 1 Gbps fiber, the mean speed of all 10 people will now be 109 Mbps, even though the mean speed of the slower 9 people is still 10 Mbps.
The median can only be elevated by improving the service speed for more than half your customers.
I had Verizon DSL at my business address. When I moved my business, I had the service moved as well. Verizon apparently doesn't have a way to transfer a dry loop (no corresponding phone service) DSL service, so they created a new account at my new address, then transferred the remainder of my service contract to the new account.
Everything seemed fine at first. I got the bills, paid them, the service continued. Then about 3 months later I got a letter from Verizon which contained a refund check for the same amount of my monthly bill. I called Verizon, and the CSR had no idea what the refund check was about. He said my account was paid and current. I didn't quite believe him (TANSTAAFL). So I waited for the following month's statement, which indeed showed no balance due. I called Verizon again, and again the CSR was unable to explain the refund check. Since the check said it was only good for 6 months and I was at 5 months, I went ahead and cashed it.
Long story short, when they'd moved my service to the new account, they'd applied my last payment for the old account to the new account. So my new account had a credit for the monthly fee. After 3 months their computer system noticed the continuous credit, automatically generated a refund check, and sent it to me. This was why everything appeared fine on my new account.
My old account however had never been paid off - they'd applied that payment to my new account. It continued accruing late fees, until after several months they sent it to collections and dinged my credit. All of this without contacting me by cell phone or email (both of which were on file with the old account) or postal mail (I'd set up forwarding with the post office). Apparently their system had no notes saying that my new account was generated as the result of a move, and oh by the way here is the old account number. So the CSRs never checked nor even knew that I had an old account.
I confronted Verizon about this, with multiple phone calls and letters (with a year's worth of bills and copies of checks I'd sent them paying each bill in time), pointing out that it was their error which caused all this. They refused to remove the bad credit report. I had to send copies of my documentation to all three credit agencies contesting it. I was hounded by a collections agency (funny how they were able to get my cell phone number from my old account when Verizon couldn't) who thankfully gave up after I sent them a copy of all the documentation as well. Unfortunately, they apparently sold the "debt" to another collections agency, and I had to do it all again a few months later. And then it happened again with another collections agency almost a year later.
So yeah, fixing the problem even after a few hours on the phone is comparatively good customer service.
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And I don't mean countersuits in response to another company or individual suing them for patent infringement. I mean, has Google ever found someone violating one of their patents, and been the first to file an infringement lawsuit?
There's plenty not to like and to worry about with Google. But by my recollection, acting like a patent troll isn't one of them. If Google is trying to get a patent for an already-existing invention, then it's far more likely they applied for it just in case the USPTO was stupid enough to grant it. That way they would have the patent instead of some patent troll who could then sue Google for it. $10,000 for a patent application is cheap insurance against a patent lawsuit which could cost $millions to defend against.
That's not what happens. In the early 1900s a few billionaires controlled large industries and artificially kept wages low. Henry Ford offered a substantially higher wage at his factories. Those wages were closer to the actual productivity of the workers, thus creating a feedback loop where the workers were able to afford the cars his factories were producing, and the increased sales produced more work for them and more wealth for Ford. (If workers are already being paid the right amount for their productivity and you try to increase their wages even higher, you get what happened to Greece a few years ago.)
In other words, the market wants wages to correctly reflect each worker's actual productivity because the economy is most efficient when that's true. It takes active work - either government corruption or collusion among all businessmen or both - to thwart that and make the middle class disappear. And if they succeed at that, it just creates an economic inefficiency. That means there's an opportunity for someone new to step in, pay a fair wage, and become a new billionaire while creating a new middle class.
The doomsday scenario you describe only exists in third world countries where the wealthy tightly control the country via bribing government officials. This artificially stunts the country's per capita productivity (usually down around $5k-$10k per person per year). But these wealthy people are more interested in being big fishes in little ponds, so they maintain their grip on the country even though it means their wealth is stunted at less than it could be. It can't happen in developed countries with higher per capita productivity because doing so would reduce per capita productivity and thus the size of the country's GDP. Meaning the wealthy class would lose wealth in the process (rather than being capped at an artificially low mount). At which point they will do everything in their power to fix the middle class and get people jobs, so they can start buying stuff being produced in these automated factories, so they can become wealthy(ier) again.
SSNs are 9-digit numbers. So even if you hash them, it only takes a rainbow table with 1 billion entries (8 GB using 2 billion long ints) to reverse it. That's small enough to fit in RAM on a modern computer. Salting would help, but I imagine whatever info was stolen during this hack was what would've been used to generate the salt as well. SSNs were never designed to be used as secure personal identification numbers, and it's difficult to try to make them secure for that purpose.
The key thing to understand here is that credit reports don't make it harder for you to get loans. If you have no credit, lenders assume you are as risky as someone with bad credit. So credit reports can only help you, not hurt you - i.e. the whole point of having credit is to demonstrate to lenders that you are not a risk and will pay their money back. This means the credit agencies could've had you generate a RSA key pair, you send them the public key, and they encrypted all your credit info with your public key (and their public key) before storing it.
Unfortunately since this method requires the consent of both the credit agency and the individual to generate a credit report, it means the credit agency would be unable to make money selling your information to marketers and junk mailers. They would only be able to make money selling credit reports to lenders. Which is why they don't do it. It's more profitable for them to keep information on you in unencrypted plaintext that they can sell to marketers.
The phone manufacturer or carrier got paid to include those apps on your phone. So in a way you're benefiting from it via a lower phone price, though it can be hard to tell with how quickly they depreciate.
To get rid of it, you gotta root the phone. To get rid of the Google apps (which are linked to the Google Play Store), you have to root the phone and install a vanilla version of Android compiled straight from Google's open source, and don't install the Google Apps bundle. As you probably guessed though, this means you give up access to the Google Play Store and any apps which you may have purchased through it.
My suggestion would be to make a law where the manufacturer or reseller (carrier) must provide warranty service for as long as software not essential to the device's operation remains on it. So if they want to get paid to put Facebook on the phone and make it impossible to delete forever, then they need to provide warranty service for the phone forever. Basically if they want to behave as if they still partially own the phone, then they need to continue to provide warranty service for it.
The last time two Cat 4+ storms made landfall in the North Atlantic was 2008. Gustav hit Cuba as a Cat 4. And Ike hit Great Inagua Island and Grand Turk Island as a Cat 4. (Paloma hit Cat 4 just south of Cuba, but dropped to a Cat 2 before landfall.)
If you mean landfall in the U.S., well the U.S. lies at the extreme northern edge of hurricane territory. So you're basically just counting outliers if you're only counting U.S. hurricanes. They're too infrequent and random to draw reliable stats from. With modern satellite coverage and flights into major storms to get precise measurements, there's no reason not to use the entire database of every storm that forms in the North Atlantic.
And those trying to tie hurricanes in with climate change invariably focus on the North Atlantic because that's the storm basin whose recent history fits their desired narrative. Meanwhile, storm frequency in the East Pacific is flat. The West Pacific is mostly flat with a recent slight downward trend. The South Pacific is down, as is the North Indian Ocean.
That's exactly what happened here, except the order of the crime and fleeing are reversed. He committed the crimes remotely - he "fled" first, then (allegedly) committed the crimes.
There's a concept in common law states called standing. The crime was (remotely) committed in the U.S. The injured party is in the U.S. The (purported) criminal is in the UK. The injured party has no standing (right to sue) in the UK. Consequently, the correct venue to hold the trial is in the U.S. This is exactly the type of situation extradition treaties were set up to address.
If what he did was legal in the UK, then it'd be a different story. And I'd completely understand if the UK refused to extradite for that reason. Likewise if the UK felt there was insufficient evidence against him, then I'd understand if they denied the extradition request (c.f. New Zealand and Kim Dotcom). But if he'd be subject to trial in the UK if he had committed these acts against a UK citizen or UK government, then there's really no reason not to honor the U.S.' extradition request. I suppose the UK could grant the U.S. government standing and the broad right to sue UK citizens in UK courts for violating UK law outside the UK against U.S. citizens and interests. But I think UK citizens would prefer extradition to that.
Because it makes it completely clear who is actually paying the taxes - the customers. A tax on revenue is otherwise known as a sales tax.
Companies don't pay corporate taxes. It gets passed on to customers as higher prices, to employees as lower wages, and to owners/stockholders as reduced dividends. You see, companies are just paper entities - they don't really exist. They're just a line a bunch of people (owners/stockholders and employees) draw around themselves so they can declare "we are working together." All the productivity, all the innovation, all the decisions are made by those people, not "the company". The company is just an inanimate banner, a flag they hold over their operations.
So you can't really tax a company. That's like impounding a car for assisting in a bank robbery, or sentencing a PC to prison for being used in a hack. Losing those items just turns into an additional financial expense for the people who used to own them. Likewise, corporate taxes are just additional financial expenses for the people involved with a company - owners/stockholders, employees, and customers.
Once you realize this, you realize how stupid it is to have a million different taxes for a million different things. It's a horribly inefficient way to collect tax revenue. The most efficient method would be to have a single tax which you assess against all people. If you believe in progressive taxation, then the obvious tax to keep is the income tax. Pretty much all other taxes* can be eliminated with no effect on the economy or tax revenue, other than vastly reducing the amount of money wasted on collecting taxes and forcing people/businesses to keep track of a million different taxes.
* (Behavior-modifying taxes would still be useful since their primary goal is not to collect revenue for the government. e.g. Fuel taxes to encourage energy efficiency, property taxes to prevent speculators from holding on to fallow land which could otherwise be put to much better use.)
This also avoids the hypocrisy of saying you believe in no taxation without representation, then simultaneously wanting to tax corporations while believing they should have no role in government.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with using a timestamp, provided (1) the timestamp has sufficient resolution to make a brute force attack unfeasible. Timestamps are used in some pseudo-random number generators - you use something like the last 8 digits of the exact nanosecond a random number was requested. And (2) Equifax only stores the hash so it can't be reverse-engineered if their password database is stolen.
Unfortunately, it looks like their timestamp only has one minute resolution, meaning there are only 1440 possible timestamps every day. Which means it'll be almost trivial for a identity thief to brute force based on when they lost their ability to use your credit, and what time of day you were likely to be awake and free to request the credit freeze. And even if they're hashing their password database, a hacker who steals it and their hashing algorithm will be able to generate a rainbow table with just a half million entries per year.
By putting a cutout on the back of the case. You know, like the non-functional cutout on many iPhone cases to let you see the Apple logo.
There's actually a mathematical difference between systems which allow only up-votes, vs systems which allow both up- and down-votes. With an up-vote only system, if a sufficient number of people think a post is insightful or interesting, it ranks high.
People mistakenly think an up/down-vote system results in fairer results. Not necessarily. It gives results which conform to the group's biases. The problem arises when the population of people likely to down-vote a post is highly disproportionate. The example I always used (to avoid political bias) is Linux vs Windows. Windows has approximately 100x more users than Linux. Imagine there's a search engine which allows users to vote search results up or down based on how useful they are.
Say a search for "how to partition a drive" gives a bunch of results for partitioning in Windows, and one result for partition in Linux. Say 1% of all users are idiots who will unfairly down-vote something just because they don't like it. So the up/down votes work properly for the Windows results. But the Linux result? Well, the 1% of Windows users who down-vote it because it isn't relevant to them (even though it's their own fault for not specifying "Windows" in the search) will exceed the number of up-votes it gets from Linux users unless every single Linux user who finds it useful up-votes it. And as a result the Linux site will be ranked as not useful, even though it's incredibly useful for Linux users (almost all of them up-voted it).
So an up/down-vote system ends up more representative of the population, but it also ends up reflecting the population's pre-existing biases. Basically it'll be rife with confirmation bias unless all the users are diligent about not down-voting just because they disagree.
On the contrary, the only reason I still use Firefox part of the time is because way back around version 2 or 3 (back when it had the configurable drag and drop UI), I took some time to configure it to my liking. When I upgraded computers, I used Firefox's built-in backup utility to backup bookmarks but didn't uncheck any options. That's when I accidentally discovered that it also backed up my UI configuration as well.
For about a decade now, I've been restoring this backup and it's been mostly successful at undoing many of the pointless UI changes Mozilla has been making to turn FF into a clone of Chrome. Being able to remove or change around UI elements is exactly what browsers need - so long as it's the user who is in control of these changes. Not some faceless designer who decides which changes to make and forces it onto all users.
(And yes I know my ID isn't that old. My co-workers told me about this site in 1998, and I browsed it as anonymous coward for many years because I was a paranoid about my privacy back then.)
This actually ties in with one of the points those on the right have been making recently - that SJWs trying to squelch free expression is detrimental to society. The slashdot moderation guidelines do a pretty good job summarizing the real goal of diversity:
We're all trying to learn as much as we can on this journey of life. And by definition, learning requires you to see or hear something you didn't know about before. So censoring or punishing people simply for expressing opinions which are unusual or unpopular decreases the opportunity for learning, because you've reduced the diversity of minds thinking about a problem. Democracy gets its strength from millions of different minds viewing a problem in millions of different ways coming up with millions of different possible solutions. That scattershot approach has a much better chance of finding a real solution than a system where diversity of opinion has been eliminated in favor of advocating the One Approved Line of Thinking.
If you have never modded up a post which you personally disagree with but thought made insightful or interesting points which you never would have thought of on your own, you are part of the reason slashdot has gone downhill.
This is a perfect example of the failure of government regulation in health care. If this had been a purely capitalistic system (not that I'm advocating pure capitalism for health care), anyone could manufacture an epi-pen type device. Once word got out that Mylan's product was failing and they weren't doing anything to fix the defect, people would stop buying them and switch to a competitor's product which was reported to be reliable on the net. Mylan's reputation would be tarnished as producing unreliable health products, and they possibly could have gone bankrupt as people stopped buying their other products as well based on their poor reputation.
The reason there's no competition and Mylan sells the only epi-pen on the market is because FDA regulations have made it prohibitively expensive for a competitor to introduce an alternative into the market. Since it's the FDA's fault there's only one product on the market, the onus is on the FDA to make sure it is reliable and effective. They failed to do that in a timely manner.
Their site is even worse than Krebs points out. I followed a link in a CNN article to the Equifax site. If I enter certain personal info, it purports to tell me if I'm affected by the hack and says it will give me the option to sign up for TrustedID Premier.
I put in my last name, a few digits of my SSN, and passed the captcha. It took me directly to a page thanking me for signing up for TrustedID Premier. It never told me if I was affected. Since others are getting the site to (sorta) work, I'm not sure if it was the fact that I was in incognito mode, my ad blocker, or my various script blockers which caused the site to malfunction. It sure as h*ll better not have signed me up for TrustedID Premier.
The fraudster just calls up and says they forgot the PIN. The credit agency then asks him/her information which only you should know to confirm identity, then lifts the freeze or resets the PIN. Still, it is (or was) the best way to protect your credit. Unfortunately, the information they use to confirm your identity is probably what's been stolen in this hack. So whoever stole it can lift any freeze you put on your credit.
Only the North Atlantic has seen a slight uptick in hurricanes the last 15 years. The eastern North Pacific has been pretty flat. Tropical cyclones in the Indian Ocean have been down. As have cyclones in the South Pacific (off Australia). And cyclones in the western North Pacific have been mostly flat with a recent downward trend.
So if you cherry-pick your data from just the one storm basin which fits your preconceived expectations and ignore all the others, yes hurricanes have been increasing in frequency and intensity.
You are the product. The customers are the banks, companies, and landlords from whom you wish to borrow money or collateral (like a leased car or apartment).
And getting rid of the credit agencies won't have the effect most people seem to think it will. Lenders won't magically assume everyone is credit-worthy if there's no way to check people's credit. They're going to assume everyone is not credit-worthy. In other words, getting rid of credit reports won't make it easier for people with poor credit to borrow money. Nothing will change for people with poor credit. The only difference will be for people who had good credit - all the banks, companies, and landlords will assume everyone has bad credit, and everything will be priced accordingly.
Unless you can prove you have enough money in the bank to cover the loan or collateral. So only the 1% would be able to borrow cheaply. The 99% would have to pay the exorbitant interest rates formerly reserved only for people with poor credit. That is the benefit the credit agencies provide you - giving you (if you're fiscally responsible) access to cheap loans without you having to keep enough money in the bank to immediately pay back the entire loan at any instant. But because people don't like being denied a loan, somehow this default base state (unable to get a loan because the lender doesn't know if they can trust you) got twisted around in people's minds into being a negative. It's not a negative; it's the neutral state. And being able to get a loan after a credit check is not a neutral, it's a positive.
I suspect maintenance costs are going to kill this idea. Ask anyone who owns a boat (power or sail) used in the ocean. You spend almost as much time maintaining it as you do using it, and replacing corroded parts is one of your biggest expenses. Even if they made the rotors out of a corrosion-resistant material like fiberglass, the fact that you need to rotate them means a lot of precision metal parts which are going to corrode and wear unless on a strict maintenance schedule. (Yes propellers spin, but they're fully submerged so you can use sacrificial anodes to protect them from corrosion. Something up in the air with droplets of saltwater mist on it is going to corrode almost overnight.)
It's the same problem the NS Savannah encountered. Making it nuclear power dropped its fuel costs to near zero. But the increased labor required to operate and maintain the nuclear reactor ended up making it more expensive than a cargo ship powered with fuel oil.
Any other studio wouldn't try this because of the potential backlash from upset consumers. Disney thinks they can get away with it because kids are going to bug their parents into getting a subscription so they can watch the Disney stuff, principles be damned. And I suspect they're right.
Copyright law gives content creators exclusive control over how their work is distributed. I agree that it's too much control, but government anti-trust law is powerless here because it's a right granted by the government in the first place.
We need to modify copyright law if we want to change it. But need I remind you that Disney is the company who successfully managed to shove life + 90 years copyright duration down our collective throats to protect Mickey Mouse.
I've always wondered. What mechanisms are in place to prevent someone taking high-res photos of their ballot while voting, going home and duplicating large quantities of them, mark the candidates they want to win, and passing them off to co-conspirators who palm them and drop them into the ballot box at the same time they're dropping in their real ballot?
The allure of paper ballots always seemed to me to be based on fear and ignorance. Supporting an old system not because it's actually superior, but because you fear the problems and challenges a new system, while you're comfortable with the problems in the old system.
Between two-factor cryptography, hashes, and blockchains, it seems to me there's gotta be some way to combine these into a digital method of tallying votes which can't be manipulated.
It looks like the person(s) who filed the complaint created a fake law firm site using info stolen from a real law firm's site. It wasn't good enough to pass a 5 minute sniff test, but apparently was good enough to pass Amazon's 1-click non-test. Likely the person(s) filed the fake complaint (and set up the fake website) using an anonymous email account.
The onus in these cases has to be on Amazon to expend the resources to properly vet these claims before acting on them. If there were viable competition between marketplaces, this wouldn't be a problem. Sellers would abandon the flaky/lazy marketplace and move to ones which treated them better. But Amazon dominates online sales, much like eBay dominates online auctions.
This is the whole reason we revolted against walled garden online services (AOL, Prodigy, GEnie, MSN) in the 1990s in favor of the open Internet. Having a handful of companies acting as gatekeepers just presents too much opportunity for abuse. When Amazon first started, I was hoping multiple online retailers like it would blossom and we'd rely on price search engines (like Pricegrabber) to invite competition between all online retailers. Unfortunately that hasn't really happened, and if anything the public seems to be gravitating back towards the walled gardens (iOS iTunes, Google Play on Android).
His TV (mechanical scanning) is analogous to Nokia's smartphone. Technically it was the first smartphone (or Blackberry was depending on how you want to define it). But it was very different from the smartphones we use today. LG introduced the first touchscreen-only smartphone, and Apple had the most initial success with it. Likewise, every mass-produced TV until the advent of plasma and LCD flatscreen TVs was based on the electronic scanning pioneered by Farnsworth.
The mean can be elevated by vastly improving speeds to a select few customers. e.g. If 10 people have service with an average (mean) speed of 10 Mbps, and you upgrade just one of them to 1 Gbps fiber, the mean speed of all 10 people will now be 109 Mbps, even though the mean speed of the slower 9 people is still 10 Mbps.
The median can only be elevated by improving the service speed for more than half your customers.
I had Verizon DSL at my business address. When I moved my business, I had the service moved as well. Verizon apparently doesn't have a way to transfer a dry loop (no corresponding phone service) DSL service, so they created a new account at my new address, then transferred the remainder of my service contract to the new account.
Everything seemed fine at first. I got the bills, paid them, the service continued. Then about 3 months later I got a letter from Verizon which contained a refund check for the same amount of my monthly bill. I called Verizon, and the CSR had no idea what the refund check was about. He said my account was paid and current. I didn't quite believe him (TANSTAAFL). So I waited for the following month's statement, which indeed showed no balance due. I called Verizon again, and again the CSR was unable to explain the refund check. Since the check said it was only good for 6 months and I was at 5 months, I went ahead and cashed it.
Long story short, when they'd moved my service to the new account, they'd applied my last payment for the old account to the new account. So my new account had a credit for the monthly fee. After 3 months their computer system noticed the continuous credit, automatically generated a refund check, and sent it to me. This was why everything appeared fine on my new account.
My old account however had never been paid off - they'd applied that payment to my new account. It continued accruing late fees, until after several months they sent it to collections and dinged my credit. All of this without contacting me by cell phone or email (both of which were on file with the old account) or postal mail (I'd set up forwarding with the post office). Apparently their system had no notes saying that my new account was generated as the result of a move, and oh by the way here is the old account number. So the CSRs never checked nor even knew that I had an old account.
I confronted Verizon about this, with multiple phone calls and letters (with a year's worth of bills and copies of checks I'd sent them paying each bill in time), pointing out that it was their error which caused all this. They refused to remove the bad credit report. I had to send copies of my documentation to all three credit agencies contesting it. I was hounded by a collections agency (funny how they were able to get my cell phone number from my old account when Verizon couldn't) who thankfully gave up after I sent them a copy of all the documentation as well. Unfortunately, they apparently sold the "debt" to another collections agency, and I had to do it all again a few months later. And then it happened again with another collections agency almost a year later.
So yeah, fixing the problem even after a few hours on the phone is comparatively good customer service.