The decision against NN had already been made, and the "public comments" were just political theater. So it doesn't really matter if they were DDOSed, since they would have had no effect either way.
It's still strange to me that Uber is the bad guy now
Uber is not the bad guy. The Texas legislature are the bad guys. The Austin city government acted badly too. Uber fought back (and won), but they didn't start it. Uber should have been left alone.
No, the state decides what sort of local control to give.
We are not discussing whether they DO, we are discussing whether they SHOULD.
Of course they have the authority to usurp local control. That doesn't mean it is the right thing to do. It is also very hypocritical of the Texas Republican party to do this, since they hold themselves up as champions of decentralization.
As opposed to taxi mafia bribing the legislature to profit at the expense of the public?
Yes. The Austin law was stupid and anti-competitive. But they have a right to be stupid, and if the citizens of Austin don't like it they can vote the incumbents out. If we give up local control just because a particular law is stupid, then we also give up local control on every other issue.
The Texas legislature should keep out of local affairs, just as the Feds should keep out of state affairs.
Disclaimer: I don't live in Texas, but I have been to Austin many times. I would MUCH rather live under the rule of the Austin city council than the Texas legislature, despite the stupidity of this particular law.
They are not paid well because they are "Cobol programmers" but because the are experts in the particular application they are hired to work on, most often because they wrote it.
If just knowing Cobol was enough to get a well paid job, then plenty of people would do so since it is a very easy language to learn.
So, according to him, Indians should simply follow the west like a trailer?
If you have a choice of X and Y, and you notice that almost everyone else, including people that that did plenty of due diligence, chose X over Y, then that is pretty solid evidence that X is a better choice. If some people that chose Y, later admitted it was a mistake and went back to X, then that is even more evidence for X. If, despite all that, you want to choose Y, then you should be able to explain why everyone else is wrong.
The challenge is meaningless. It is far easier to install a backdoor than to detect one. Heartbleed went undetected for years, and that was an unintentional bug with full source available to anyone. A maliciously designed backdoor, specifically designed to be hidden, would be far harder to detect. It is not clear from TFA if the hackers will have access to the source code, but since it says they will not be allowed to "tweak" the EVMs, it sounds like they will not, and they certainly will not be allowed to recompile to install instrumentation to capture intermediate state. They are also only give 4-5 days, which is nowhere near enough time to understand a complex system.
This "hacker challenge" is designed to ensure failure. Why? They only reason I can think of is that they are hiding something.
The problem with the "cleanup" is that once you have "cleaned up" the radiation, where are you going to put it? In a landfill? That is just moving the problem from one place to another. A geological repository like Yucca Mountain doesn't work, because that is for small amounts of high level waste, not large amounts of low level waste like we have at Hanford.
There really aren't any good solutions, but in politics "something must be done" so paying contractors to play environmental theater while they move stuff around in circles is about the best we can do.
Costco has a ten-pack of LED bulbs for $4.95. That is 50 cents each. At that price, the payback for typical use is less than ONE MONTH when replacing incandescents. LED bulbs have none of the drawbacks of CFLs. They are instantly bright, they are durable (I dropped one 8 feet onto a concrete floor, and it bounced), and they contain no toxic mercury.
My house now has exactly one incandescent bulb: In my son's lava lamp, where a dim hot bulb is exactly what is needed.
Here is a chart of electricity prices in America since 1960. When corrected for inflation, prices today are about the same as 50 years ago. So, no, I don't think there has been any vast conspiracy to raise prices.
I have cut my consumption by about 40% in the last ten years. Since California has tiered pricing, and all my consumption is in the bottom tier (about 10 cents/kw-hr), my electricity bill is less than half what it was in 2007.
All my lights are LED. All TVs and monitors went from CRT to flatscreen. New more efficient refrigerator. New dishwasher with air drying. Attic fan to reduce need for A/C. Ceiling fans in all bedrooms. Clip fans under every desk. All outside lights triggered by motion sensors.
And by far the biggest energy saver: Teenage daughter moved and and went to college.
Maybe you should just learn to travel lighter. I haven't been to a check-in counter in years. I check-in online, download my boarding pass to my phone, and then go straight to the gate.
Fortunately the airlines are now charging luggage fees, so at least the people lugging 100 pounds of crap with them on a weekend trip are paying their fair share.
No, you do not have it right. If the market for ISPs was competitive, then Net Neutrality would not be needed, because if consumers didn't like their ISP's policies, they could just switch to another. But the ISP market is NOT competitive, not even close. Most consumers have a choice of exactly one broadband provider.
Regulating monopolies to prevent them from abusing their dominance is a legitimate role of government.
This story doesn't make sense. This is the month of May. Arctic thawing peaks in September. In May, the thaw is barely beginning. So either they made some astonishingly bad design decisions (unlikely), or TFA is exaggerating or fabricating what actually happened (much more likely).
In once sentence TFA says the leak is from "meltwater", and a few sentences later it blamed on heavy rain.
Huge queues at all petrol stations. One owner of a petrol station decided to take advantage of the situation and doubled his prices.
There are plenty of people who would much rather pay double than waste an hour in a queue. These people would be grateful that someone had the sense to price to market.
People had to pay, he made a mint.
Except that no one HAD to pay. They could continue to wait in the queues at the other petrol stations. They were just offered the additional option of paying with money rather than time. Since he "made a mint" it is clear that many people preferred than option.
Then the strike was over. His petrol station was absolutely empty. It took six weeks until he was bankrupt.
Of course you just made all this up. In the absence of price controls, ALL of the stations would have raised their prices. Feel free to provide a citation to prove me wrong.
Certainly not my experience here in Australia, many bank branches have closed, and those still open have very few tellers
That is not the case in America. Since the introduction of ATMs, teller employment has gone up. This is an example of Jevons Paradox. As ATMs proliferated, and could handle routine transactions, human tellers could focus on more high level services. This made human tellers MORE PROFITABLE, so banks wanted more of them, not fewer. The number of tellers in each branch went down, but banks opened a lot more branches. There is a bank branch inside my local grocery store. You can use the ATM there to make a cash withdraw, or you can talk to the human teller about refinancing your mortgage.
Disclaimer: I once visited Australia, but never went in a bank.
What is there left to do that is meaningful work in any way?
When farms were being automated in 1880-1920 the factories were also being automated, with workshops replaced by assembly lines, and manual labor replaced with steam engines and then electricity. What was there left to do that was meaningful work in any way?
Let me guess: You're old. I once saw a report on the demographics of people that refused to use ATMs. They were mostly 70+. Banks are now charging them a fee to use a human teller.
Of course it immediately beeped for service assistance because one item was too heavy (bottle of soda).
Those sorts of problems occur way less frequently than just a couple years ago. They will continue to improve, just like ATMs no longer jam when dispensing cash.
If there are no entry-level jobs, how do we teach people work?
There are entry-level jobs besides retail. For instance, restaurant employment is going up. Also, once the Mexicans have paid for their wall, there will be lots of entry level jobs picking fruit.
In other words this is just an opinion. They could or they may not.
It is opinion based on an extrapolation of current trends. Retail employment is dropping steadily, and there is no reason to believe that will stop or reverse. Stores are replacing human workers with kiosks and automation, while the stores themselves are being replaced by Amazon. Per unit of sales, physical stores employ three times as many people as Amazon (although that doesn't include the delivery drivers), and Amazon is also automating.
Retail work is some of the most thankless, soul-flaying work there is.
It is also work that adds very little value. A checkout clerk isn't actually producing anything. A self-checkout kiosk can already do the same job, and is often better because the lines can be shorter.
The purpose of work is to produce goods and services, not "keeping people busy". So the elimination of these unproductive jobs is a good thing.
As retail sales jobs disappear, stores that sell goods are being replaced with businesses that sell services, such as restaurants, hairdressers, etc. People are more likely to "eat out" than ever before, and I doubt if many people would want to be waited on by a robot. So while some jobs fade away, others are being created.
The customer has the right to know how much it will cost before the transaction occurs.
Taxis don't do that. Why should Uber? At least Uber gives you an estimate, but the final price can depend on traffic delays. I don't use Uber, but Lyft estimates are usually accurate.
(Like hell I'm paying an extra 25% for a DOCSIS 3.0 modem.)
This is exactly how markets are supposed to work. If there is a temporary shortage, the price should go up so that people with an urgent need can get what they want, while people (like you) that are willing to wait get lower prices.
It's not legal to charge different, individual people a different price.
Hogwash. In the United States it is illegal to discriminate against an enumerated list of protected classes, including race, color, religion, national origin, etc. Discrimination is generally legal on any other basis. Some of these class protections are only for employment. For instance, age discrimination is illegal in hiring, but allowed in pricing (hence "senior discounts" and "student discounts").
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The decision against NN had already been made, and the "public comments" were just political theater. So it doesn't really matter if they were DDOSed, since they would have had no effect either way.
It's still strange to me that Uber is the bad guy now
Uber is not the bad guy. The Texas legislature are the bad guys. The Austin city government acted badly too. Uber fought back (and won), but they didn't start it. Uber should have been left alone.
No, the state decides what sort of local control to give.
We are not discussing whether they DO, we are discussing whether they SHOULD.
Of course they have the authority to usurp local control. That doesn't mean it is the right thing to do. It is also very hypocritical of the Texas Republican party to do this, since they hold themselves up as champions of decentralization.
As opposed to taxi mafia bribing the legislature to profit at the expense of the public?
Yes. The Austin law was stupid and anti-competitive. But they have a right to be stupid, and if the citizens of Austin don't like it they can vote the incumbents out. If we give up local control just because a particular law is stupid, then we also give up local control on every other issue.
The Texas legislature should keep out of local affairs, just as the Feds should keep out of state affairs.
Disclaimer: I don't live in Texas, but I have been to Austin many times. I would MUCH rather live under the rule of the Austin city council than the Texas legislature, despite the stupidity of this particular law.
They are not paid well because they are "Cobol programmers" but because the are experts in the particular application they are hired to work on, most often because they wrote it.
If just knowing Cobol was enough to get a well paid job, then plenty of people would do so since it is a very easy language to learn.
So, according to him, Indians should simply follow the west like a trailer?
If you have a choice of X and Y, and you notice that almost everyone else, including people that that did plenty of due diligence, chose X over Y, then that is pretty solid evidence that X is a better choice. If some people that chose Y, later admitted it was a mistake and went back to X, then that is even more evidence for X. If, despite all that, you want to choose Y, then you should be able to explain why everyone else is wrong.
The challenge is meaningless. It is far easier to install a backdoor than to detect one. Heartbleed went undetected for years, and that was an unintentional bug with full source available to anyone. A maliciously designed backdoor, specifically designed to be hidden, would be far harder to detect. It is not clear from TFA if the hackers will have access to the source code, but since it says they will not be allowed to "tweak" the EVMs, it sounds like they will not, and they certainly will not be allowed to recompile to install instrumentation to capture intermediate state. They are also only give 4-5 days, which is nowhere near enough time to understand a complex system.
This "hacker challenge" is designed to ensure failure. Why? They only reason I can think of is that they are hiding something.
The problem with the "cleanup" is that once you have "cleaned up" the radiation, where are you going to put it? In a landfill? That is just moving the problem from one place to another. A geological repository like Yucca Mountain doesn't work, because that is for small amounts of high level waste, not large amounts of low level waste like we have at Hanford.
There really aren't any good solutions, but in politics "something must be done" so paying contractors to play environmental theater while they move stuff around in circles is about the best we can do.
Costco has a ten-pack of LED bulbs for $4.95. That is 50 cents each. At that price, the payback for typical use is less than ONE MONTH when replacing incandescents. LED bulbs have none of the drawbacks of CFLs. They are instantly bright, they are durable (I dropped one 8 feet onto a concrete floor, and it bounced), and they contain no toxic mercury.
My house now has exactly one incandescent bulb: In my son's lava lamp, where a dim hot bulb is exactly what is needed.
Here is a chart of electricity prices in America since 1960. When corrected for inflation, prices today are about the same as 50 years ago. So, no, I don't think there has been any vast conspiracy to raise prices.
I have cut my consumption by about 40% in the last ten years. Since California has tiered pricing, and all my consumption is in the bottom tier (about 10 cents/kw-hr), my electricity bill is less than half what it was in 2007.
All my lights are LED.
All TVs and monitors went from CRT to flatscreen.
New more efficient refrigerator.
New dishwasher with air drying.
Attic fan to reduce need for A/C.
Ceiling fans in all bedrooms.
Clip fans under every desk.
All outside lights triggered by motion sensors.
And by far the biggest energy saver: Teenage daughter moved and and went to college.
Maybe you should just learn to travel lighter. I haven't been to a check-in counter in years. I check-in online, download my boarding pass to my phone, and then go straight to the gate.
Fortunately the airlines are now charging luggage fees, so at least the people lugging 100 pounds of crap with them on a weekend trip are paying their fair share.
Let me see if I have this right
No, you do not have it right. If the market for ISPs was competitive, then Net Neutrality would not be needed, because if consumers didn't like their ISP's policies, they could just switch to another. But the ISP market is NOT competitive, not even close. Most consumers have a choice of exactly one broadband provider.
Regulating monopolies to prevent them from abusing their dominance is a legitimate role of government.
This story doesn't make sense. This is the month of May. Arctic thawing peaks in September. In May, the thaw is barely beginning. So either they made some astonishingly bad design decisions (unlikely), or TFA is exaggerating or fabricating what actually happened (much more likely).
In once sentence TFA says the leak is from "meltwater", and a few sentences later it blamed on heavy rain.
Huge queues at all petrol stations. One owner of a petrol station decided to take advantage of the situation and doubled his prices.
There are plenty of people who would much rather pay double than waste an hour in a queue. These people would be grateful that someone had the sense to price to market.
People had to pay, he made a mint.
Except that no one HAD to pay. They could continue to wait in the queues at the other petrol stations. They were just offered the additional option of paying with money rather than time. Since he "made a mint" it is clear that many people preferred than option.
Then the strike was over. His petrol station was absolutely empty. It took six weeks until he was bankrupt.
Of course you just made all this up. In the absence of price controls, ALL of the stations would have raised their prices. Feel free to provide a citation to prove me wrong.
Certainly not my experience here in Australia, many bank branches have closed, and those still open have very few tellers
That is not the case in America. Since the introduction of ATMs, teller employment has gone up. This is an example of Jevons Paradox. As ATMs proliferated, and could handle routine transactions, human tellers could focus on more high level services. This made human tellers MORE PROFITABLE, so banks wanted more of them, not fewer. The number of tellers in each branch went down, but banks opened a lot more branches. There is a bank branch inside my local grocery store. You can use the ATM there to make a cash withdraw, or you can talk to the human teller about refinancing your mortgage.
Disclaimer: I once visited Australia, but never went in a bank.
What is there left to do that is meaningful work in any way?
When farms were being automated in 1880-1920 the factories were also being automated, with workshops replaced by assembly lines, and manual labor replaced with steam engines and then electricity. What was there left to do that was meaningful work in any way?
Waves of illegal aliens IS a national security matter.
The "waves of illegal aliens" ended more than a decade ago. Net immigration from Mexico is near zero.
More Mexicans leaving than coming to the US
First you need to find a source of free energy
Solar panels and windmills assembled by robots from materials mined by robots.
I hate self serve kiosks.
Let me guess: You're old. I once saw a report on the demographics of people that refused to use ATMs. They were mostly 70+. Banks are now charging them a fee to use a human teller.
Of course it immediately beeped for service assistance because one item was too heavy (bottle of soda).
Those sorts of problems occur way less frequently than just a couple years ago. They will continue to improve, just like ATMs no longer jam when dispensing cash.
If there are no entry-level jobs, how do we teach people work?
There are entry-level jobs besides retail. For instance, restaurant employment is going up. Also, once the Mexicans have paid for their wall, there will be lots of entry level jobs picking fruit.
In other words this is just an opinion. They could or they may not.
It is opinion based on an extrapolation of current trends. Retail employment is dropping steadily, and there is no reason to believe that will stop or reverse. Stores are replacing human workers with kiosks and automation, while the stores themselves are being replaced by Amazon. Per unit of sales, physical stores employ three times as many people as Amazon (although that doesn't include the delivery drivers), and Amazon is also automating.
Retail work is some of the most thankless, soul-flaying work there is.
It is also work that adds very little value. A checkout clerk isn't actually producing anything. A self-checkout kiosk can already do the same job, and is often better because the lines can be shorter.
The purpose of work is to produce goods and services, not "keeping people busy". So the elimination of these unproductive jobs is a good thing.
As retail sales jobs disappear, stores that sell goods are being replaced with businesses that sell services, such as restaurants, hairdressers, etc. People are more likely to "eat out" than ever before, and I doubt if many people would want to be waited on by a robot. So while some jobs fade away, others are being created.
The customer has the right to know how much it will cost before the transaction occurs.
Taxis don't do that. Why should Uber? At least Uber gives you an estimate, but the final price can depend on traffic delays. I don't use Uber, but Lyft estimates are usually accurate.
(Like hell I'm paying an extra 25% for a DOCSIS 3.0 modem.)
This is exactly how markets are supposed to work. If there is a temporary shortage, the price should go up so that people with an urgent need can get what they want, while people (like you) that are willing to wait get lower prices.
It's not legal to charge different, individual people a different price.
Hogwash. In the United States it is illegal to discriminate against an enumerated list of protected classes, including race, color, religion, national origin, etc. Discrimination is generally legal on any other basis. Some of these class protections are only for employment. For instance, age discrimination is illegal in hiring, but allowed in pricing (hence "senior discounts" and "student discounts").