Since nobody seems to be putting the actual facts as a response:
As part of an agreement with the power company, the city gave them the right to build a large hydroelectric dam on city property in exchange for access to an allotment of power at an extremely cheap rate. When they exceed that allotment, the city has to buy off power exchange, which is significantly more, accounting for covering storage, exchange, and transmission costs on the larger network.
The city very rarely (or never) exceeded that allotment before, and now is. Because of how the contracts are structured, that additional cost is passed on to all consumers on their bill - everyone pays based on time-windowed averaged costs of power over the month, not the exact real cost at the moment of consumption (this is pretty normal due to storage and variable rates per time block otherwise making bills goofy complicated).
The result is they voted in an 18-month stop on NEW cryptomining operations (existing ones can continue) with a plan to submit to the appropriate regulatory bodies a modification to electrical pricing that would allow them to place the additional costs from the Power Exchange on high power utilization businesses, rather than across all users. The cryptomining operations mostly seem okay with this, as the proposal still sees them get a decent chunk of cheap power.
Note that's 28% before taxes. Between State, Local, and Federal, figure they get $150k a year pretax, $100k a year post-tax, but spend $50k a year on their mortgage. That's $50k a year for ALL other expenses, and that number excludes homeowner's insurance, car payments, car insurance, health insurance, property taxes, electricity, water... oh, and food. That's why 28% is so important - you wind up with 30% on Taxes, 30% on Mortgage, 10% on a Car and Related Expenses, 10% on Home Related Expenses... and you just ate 80% of the yearly income.
Cali's actual total tax rate is a little higher than that, but you get the point I think - 28% isn't an arbitratry number, it's more like a 'this is a good margin of error' factor.
Blizzard own copyright over things like Quest Text, art design, textures, logos, map designs, and sound/music independently of the game. If they rebuilt their servers without using any of those, the case would be in question, but it's not. Even if purchase of a game gave you the legal rights you're implying (and it does not!), it does not give you free reign to use the remaining copyrighted content.
The second element is the question of abandonment. If you buy a copy of World of Warcraft off the shelf, and install it, you can still play it. That the specific version you want is not available doesn't mean the game itself is abandoned. Wizards of the Coast can (and do!) go after people who mass print for distribution their own copies of cards that are no longer legal or in print despite those being for a version of the game which is no longer in existence - there's no question that, even if they've effectively abandoned that version of the game, they still can control distribution of those cards.
TL,DR: Blizzard owns multiple levels of copyright on WoW and it's constituent parts, and even if an out-of-date version of a ongoing, consistently updated game counts as abandoned, they still have a number of claims against people running servers in a even semi-public fashion.
Assuming you mean Federal Debt, no. They're the largest single holder at about 19% of foreign held debt, which only makes up 47% of the total debt. It's worth keeping an eye on it, but they owe us about 0.85 cents for every $1 dollar we owe them - they can't play hardball with us unless they want us to screw them over.
Since they've done another round, I'll point to the Phoronix dev's actual testing where they're showing 10-15% under actual benchmarks in configurations that look like more like production to me. I don't see ANYONE able to corroborate even the lower 30% numbers people are throwing around without using fully synthetic benchmarks that do nothing but make system calls, let alone the 60% I've seen used in a couple of places (and here!).
I got no clue what they're on about - that's not even what the Phoronix devs are saying - See HERE, where they're showing real world, non-synthetic stuff at between 10% and 20%. They're saying they can produce some really bad numbers with synthetic benchmarks on extremely fast SSDs, which is about the worst possible setup for this bug, but under more normal conditions they're not seeing a large hit. They're seeing nothing on some older systems with spinning disks where waiting for the disk covers the additional overhead.
Your understanding is incorrect in general - 'Public Figures' need to have Malice, which normally includes knowledge of the false statement and intention to harm, but most companies do not fall under Public Figure.
For general defamation they need to have:
a) Published something false
b) Caused harm
c) Acted negligently or with malice
They didn't need to know what they were publishing is false, although that helps. They DO need to know what they were publishing things with reduced verification. Keeper contacted them repeatedly, and they updated the article repeatedly, so I'm guessing their argument is basically going to be 'They knew after our first contact that they had falsehoods up, and did not modify them'.
The existing limits are pretty low in a lot of ways, because they're calibrated for maximum safety. There's also thresholds that seem to move from 'Long term small risk, body seems to handle pretty well' to 'short term damage, long term massive risk' to 'short term massive damage' pretty sharply - you can be pretty normal for a while, then have a large shift in risk.
As such, I'm not sure this itself is a bad thing - emergency responders almost certainly can handle elevated levels over normal with minimal health risks for the *duration of a rescue operation*. I'm just not happy it's coming out in a 'gut regulations' period, because emergency responders aren't going to *live* in those areas, and the nuance is unlikely to be communicated effectively.
Sure, e-mail can have malware, but who wants to bet maintenance agreements and business insurance care way more about the presence of an industry standard virus scan in the loop?
Laugh all you want, hackers. It's not a technical control, it's a business control.
You're assuming the data is unbiased - one of the known issues with systems like this is that biased policing can lead to datasets that don't reflect reality. A common example is how every other piece of data we have suggests that all racial and economic groups use illegal drugs at similar levels, but when you feed drug arrest records into predictive systems, they tell you lower income minority neighborhoods should be targeted. Which, logically, results in an even higher rate of arrest in those neighborhoods, but means there's even fewer police resources looking at other areas, potentially depressing arrests. And when you feed THAT data back in, it reinforces the same patterns.
Existing police biases generate the data you're feeding into the system. Bias in, Bias out. It's not like this is a new idea.
Well, most Hate Crime laws attach to existing laws (typically, Assault or Racketeering laws - the above example winds up under Assault) and add additional sanctions for specific kinds of attacks, just as many legal systems will distinguish between various kinds of homicide, theft, etc.
I WILL admit I haven't checked the specific laws in this article, because who has that much time when you're not a lawyer, but I think there's a useful statement to be made about Hate Crime laws in the general here.
Never understood this argument. In some platonic, ideal realm, knowledge/ideas are not scarce, but a person's life/time is. A patent is (supposed to be - I acknowledge the modern system has serious issues) a recognition of the intersection between the time and effort spent on obtaining specialized knowledge, which is not generally available, and labour/time to develop their not-plainly-obvious innovation.
The patent isn't acknowledging some form of ownership of an idea, it's a limited license on financial exploitability in recognition of effort. There's a lot of reasons that has gotten screwed up in the current system, but despite some serious issues and a small number of hideously bad actors, it's not a burn-it-down situation.
Facebook is, allegedly, attempting to do the whole 'trusted ad' thing with their bypass - they vet ads, they're served from Facebook servers, they don't allow JS, Flash, or other active content.
Which ignores malicious images and buggy browser render engines which can allow them to run arbitrary code. So, you know, +5 for good intentions, -100000000 for failing to understand the attack surface.
Going to the police around sexual harassment has a poor track record of going anywhere, even with witnesses. Most of the time it winds up around competing accusations. Evidence is often scarce, and with charismatic folks involved, people may not realize the extent they've been manipulated until later. Abusers often target people who are not in a position to speak up, where their career could be at risk. Conventions are also a giant issue - doing all of this hundreds of miles distant even further reduces the odds of success, and ratchets up the stress. And, of course, the stress of spending the next few years being literally forced to deal with your abuser by the legal system.
That's before you get into things like real cases where police gaslighted a rape victim into recanting, prosecuted them for reporting the rape, and only come around once they catch the rapist who kept the physical evidence of the rape exactly as reported. Or the public attacks against the credibility of people who report to police, have witnesses, photographic and video evidence and pursue a restraining order, exactly as people tell them to. Or people assume you're lying because you don't react the way they expect you to (hint: many rape victims do not weep or rage - mostly, they dissaociate, and come across as calm and a little cold, because on many levels, they're avoiding emotional connection to the events as a coping mechanism. But guess what behavior is extremely likely to make people doubt your accusation?).
So people wind up not reporting, and maybe convince themselves it was a one time thing, or maybe she played too big a role in it, and he's too important... then someone else mentions something. And someone else. And a fourth person. And it snowballs, and you wind up in a situation where none of the victims can make effective claims in court, but something is obviously wrong. Remaining silent means that others are going to go into interactions with this person unprepared. So, people say something. Eventually, enough people, with enough credibility, step forward. Some stuff that other members of the board have seen goes from odd to seriously concerning, so they step down. Some of them, like you, don't want to see action without a legal conviction, so they step down. who knows what the rest thinks, but good odds they just decide to give the org a fresh start.
Going to the police around sexual harassment has a poor track record of going anywhere, even with witnesses. Most of the time it winds up around competing accusations. Evidence is often scarce, and with charismatic folks involved, people may not realize the extent they've been manipulated until later. Abusers often target people who are not in a position to speak up, where their career could be at risk. Conventions are also a giant issue - doing all of this hundreds of miles distant even further reduces the odds of success, and ratchets up the stress. And, of course, the stress of spending the next few years being literally forced to deal with your abuser by the legal system.
That's before you get into things like real cases where police gaslighted a rape victim into recanting, prosecuted them for reporting the rape, and only come around once they catch the rapist who kept the physical evidence of the rape exactly as reported. Or the public attacks against the credibility of people who report to police, have witnesses, photographic and video evidence and pursue a restraining order, exactly as people tell them to.
So you wind up not reporting, and maybe convince yourself it was a one time thing, or maybe you played too big a role in it, and he's too important... then someone else mentions something. And someone else. And a fourth person. And it snowballs, and you wind up in a situation where none of you can make effective claims in court, but something is obviously wrong. Remaining silent means that others are going to go into interactions with this person unprepared. So, you say something.
So how do you create multiple playlist with the same song in multiple playlists without copying files to multiple locations?
With playlists, of course. I hate to overgeneralize, but most of the folks I know who still use players like this can't stand the Media Library approach that most modern players use - we already have an organizational system that makes it easy to find files, and may have.mp3 from back in the ID3v1 days with inaccurate or incomplete data. We may have a LOT of it. We may not want to spend hours fixing these files to make the Library work efficiently for us when we have a system that lets us build (and save!) custom playlists efficiently already.
How do you create a playlist with songs you haven't heard in the pass six months except for songs you've skipped x times? Yes iTunes is bloated piece of crap and I never let my iOS device go near it. But smart playlists and being able to view and sort your music based on metadata is not a bad thing.
In this case, you really can't. That's a definite tradeoff, but it's one I am okay making.
3.5m
- 5% for failed Pledges = 175k
- 10% for Kickstarter and Credit Processor Fees = 350k
- 20% for Taxes (this is income!) = 700k
Total received budget ~= 2.28m
Now, figure 30% of that is shipping (684k), 40% of it is manufacturing (912k).
Left over: $684K
Now, common wisdom is that hiring one guy at $60k a year costs you $100k a year total in physical plant, HR, Payroll, benefits, etc. While I doubt they had ALL of that, let's say they're five guys, so now they have $184k to absorb any unexpected expenses and such. So if you have to do thee site visits due to QC issues, or have a supplier disappear (not entirely unlikely, but one of the less well known issues), or have to hire two or three extra people to handle the volume you just weren't prepared for, that's gone, you don't have any flex left. And those are the more common issues - imagine you do two site visits and then have to pay to have someone else do your manufacturing at 50% more: because it turns out everyone was lowballing their quotes, and when you go back to the other companies they tell you that they can't do it at that price.
Not excusing them, but people tend to go "How could they lose [LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY]" when the answer is "Most of what the campaign made was already earmarked to known costs - each pledge did not make them a lot of money, because what they were doing was expensive!" And they made the same scheduling and budgeting mistakes everyone makes.
After they were originally issued in the 30s and 40s, there was a fad where people would have their SSN tattooed on their body as the government emphasized the importance of remembering them.
The semi-public nature of the SSN is kind of interesting. Originally, they were basically intended to track your contribution to Social Security - what would you do, fraudulently contribute to someone else's retirement? Thus far, I don't believe they've been reissued, but we're likely pretty close, since they're NOT just random number combinations.
Now, it only took them a few years before things went... strangely, but not badly, but their continued flow into general life means that a system designed to be semi-public has now gotten tendrils everywhere, and protection on them is not as good as it should be.
Planes generally average around 500mph, and the average plane flight time between SF and LA is... roughly 57 minutes.
You'd have to hit much higher speeds to not be survivable. You're just going to be spending the last 15 minutes slowing down gradually.
There's still plenty of room for improvement. Spacing out races and/or changing rules to prevent horses from competing in 'back to back' races would be more humane with very limited impact on the sport. Switching races to synthetic courses which have been shown to reduce the number of horses who need to be put down. Hell, switch to a team based model where you decide who's going to race 48 hours before the event, so there's some room for unexpected injuries and such to be healed.... oh, wait, gambling would take a big hit there, so that'll never happen.
I think people are getting hung up on some (admittedly bad) phrasing.
The statement "Editor's note: I just got back from a busy weekend to see that a bunch of people are freaking out that we're "burying" this story, so here it is." isn't why they delayed the story, but why they're posting it now. That is, they were trying to gather information before the weekend, the weekend happened, they came back, and posted it without the additional info because they were seeing the freakout.
Most hate crime laws are based on racketeering charges - effectively a hate crime is one which targets one person as a means to target a larger group. Racketeering was used against criminals who attack one business to make others pay up protection money. When shooting someone who is gay/black/jewish/russian, because they're gay/black/jewish/russian, the message that gets communicated to the rest of the gay/black/jewish/russian community is 'You are not safe, we will kill you, unless you leave'.
Generally speaking, most of the time, Hate Crime laws aren't applied, largely because you need to establish that the goal wasn't just to get the person, but because you wanted to have a chilling effect on people who are gay/black/jewish/russian as well. In the US, as well, hate crimes typically have to be Punishment Enhancing - that is, they can only attach to an existing crime, not on their own, and make the sentence worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Since nobody seems to be putting the actual facts as a response:
As part of an agreement with the power company, the city gave them the right to build a large hydroelectric dam on city property in exchange for access to an allotment of power at an extremely cheap rate. When they exceed that allotment, the city has to buy off power exchange, which is significantly more, accounting for covering storage, exchange, and transmission costs on the larger network.
The city very rarely (or never) exceeded that allotment before, and now is. Because of how the contracts are structured, that additional cost is passed on to all consumers on their bill - everyone pays based on time-windowed averaged costs of power over the month, not the exact real cost at the moment of consumption (this is pretty normal due to storage and variable rates per time block otherwise making bills goofy complicated).
The result is they voted in an 18-month stop on NEW cryptomining operations (existing ones can continue) with a plan to submit to the appropriate regulatory bodies a modification to electrical pricing that would allow them to place the additional costs from the Power Exchange on high power utilization businesses, rather than across all users. The cryptomining operations mostly seem okay with this, as the proposal still sees them get a decent chunk of cheap power.
Note that's 28% before taxes. Between State, Local, and Federal, figure they get $150k a year pretax, $100k a year post-tax, but spend $50k a year on their mortgage. That's $50k a year for ALL other expenses, and that number excludes homeowner's insurance, car payments, car insurance, health insurance, property taxes, electricity, water... oh, and food. That's why 28% is so important - you wind up with 30% on Taxes, 30% on Mortgage, 10% on a Car and Related Expenses, 10% on Home Related Expenses... and you just ate 80% of the yearly income.
Cali's actual total tax rate is a little higher than that, but you get the point I think - 28% isn't an arbitratry number, it's more like a 'this is a good margin of error' factor.
To play, you have to download a 5.6gb package from them. I very much doubt they're pushing a 5.6gb client package that contains none of that.
Blizzard own copyright over things like Quest Text, art design, textures, logos, map designs, and sound/music independently of the game. If they rebuilt their servers without using any of those, the case would be in question, but it's not. Even if purchase of a game gave you the legal rights you're implying (and it does not!), it does not give you free reign to use the remaining copyrighted content.
The second element is the question of abandonment. If you buy a copy of World of Warcraft off the shelf, and install it, you can still play it. That the specific version you want is not available doesn't mean the game itself is abandoned. Wizards of the Coast can (and do!) go after people who mass print for distribution their own copies of cards that are no longer legal or in print despite those being for a version of the game which is no longer in existence - there's no question that, even if they've effectively abandoned that version of the game, they still can control distribution of those cards.
TL,DR: Blizzard owns multiple levels of copyright on WoW and it's constituent parts, and even if an out-of-date version of a ongoing, consistently updated game counts as abandoned, they still have a number of claims against people running servers in a even semi-public fashion.
Assuming you mean Federal Debt, no. They're the largest single holder at about 19% of foreign held debt, which only makes up 47% of the total debt. It's worth keeping an eye on it, but they owe us about 0.85 cents for every $1 dollar we owe them - they can't play hardball with us unless they want us to screw them over.
Since they've done another round, I'll point to the Phoronix dev's actual testing where they're showing 10-15% under actual benchmarks in configurations that look like more like production to me. I don't see ANYONE able to corroborate even the lower 30% numbers people are throwing around without using fully synthetic benchmarks that do nothing but make system calls, let alone the 60% I've seen used in a couple of places (and here!).
I got no clue what they're on about - that's not even what the Phoronix devs are saying - See HERE, where they're showing real world, non-synthetic stuff at between 10% and 20%. They're saying they can produce some really bad numbers with synthetic benchmarks on extremely fast SSDs, which is about the worst possible setup for this bug, but under more normal conditions they're not seeing a large hit. They're seeing nothing on some older systems with spinning disks where waiting for the disk covers the additional overhead.
Your understanding is incorrect in general - 'Public Figures' need to have Malice, which normally includes knowledge of the false statement and intention to harm, but most companies do not fall under Public Figure.
For general defamation they need to have:
a) Published something false
b) Caused harm
c) Acted negligently or with malice
They didn't need to know what they were publishing is false, although that helps. They DO need to know what they were publishing things with reduced verification. Keeper contacted them repeatedly, and they updated the article repeatedly, so I'm guessing their argument is basically going to be 'They knew after our first contact that they had falsehoods up, and did not modify them'.
Define successful?
Do you mean 1.5 billion lost in a single quarter?
Do you mean losing 10% market share in a year?
Massive leadership turnover?
Such success.
The existing limits are pretty low in a lot of ways, because they're calibrated for maximum safety. There's also thresholds that seem to move from 'Long term small risk, body seems to handle pretty well' to 'short term damage, long term massive risk' to 'short term massive damage' pretty sharply - you can be pretty normal for a while, then have a large shift in risk.
As such, I'm not sure this itself is a bad thing - emergency responders almost certainly can handle elevated levels over normal with minimal health risks for the *duration of a rescue operation*. I'm just not happy it's coming out in a 'gut regulations' period, because emergency responders aren't going to *live* in those areas, and the nuance is unlikely to be communicated effectively.
Sure, e-mail can have malware, but who wants to bet maintenance agreements and business insurance care way more about the presence of an industry standard virus scan in the loop? Laugh all you want, hackers. It's not a technical control, it's a business control.
You're assuming the data is unbiased - one of the known issues with systems like this is that biased policing can lead to datasets that don't reflect reality. A common example is how every other piece of data we have suggests that all racial and economic groups use illegal drugs at similar levels, but when you feed drug arrest records into predictive systems, they tell you lower income minority neighborhoods should be targeted. Which, logically, results in an even higher rate of arrest in those neighborhoods, but means there's even fewer police resources looking at other areas, potentially depressing arrests. And when you feed THAT data back in, it reinforces the same patterns.
Existing police biases generate the data you're feeding into the system. Bias in, Bias out. It's not like this is a new idea.
Well, most Hate Crime laws attach to existing laws (typically, Assault or Racketeering laws - the above example winds up under Assault) and add additional sanctions for specific kinds of attacks, just as many legal systems will distinguish between various kinds of homicide, theft, etc. I WILL admit I haven't checked the specific laws in this article, because who has that much time when you're not a lawyer, but I think there's a useful statement to be made about Hate Crime laws in the general here.
Never understood this argument. In some platonic, ideal realm, knowledge/ideas are not scarce, but a person's life/time is. A patent is (supposed to be - I acknowledge the modern system has serious issues) a recognition of the intersection between the time and effort spent on obtaining specialized knowledge, which is not generally available, and labour/time to develop their not-plainly-obvious innovation. The patent isn't acknowledging some form of ownership of an idea, it's a limited license on financial exploitability in recognition of effort. There's a lot of reasons that has gotten screwed up in the current system, but despite some serious issues and a small number of hideously bad actors, it's not a burn-it-down situation.
Facebook is, allegedly, attempting to do the whole 'trusted ad' thing with their bypass - they vet ads, they're served from Facebook servers, they don't allow JS, Flash, or other active content. Which ignores malicious images and buggy browser render engines which can allow them to run arbitrary code. So, you know, +5 for good intentions, -100000000 for failing to understand the attack surface.
Going to the police around sexual harassment has a poor track record of going anywhere, even with witnesses. Most of the time it winds up around competing accusations. Evidence is often scarce, and with charismatic folks involved, people may not realize the extent they've been manipulated until later. Abusers often target people who are not in a position to speak up, where their career could be at risk. Conventions are also a giant issue - doing all of this hundreds of miles distant even further reduces the odds of success, and ratchets up the stress. And, of course, the stress of spending the next few years being literally forced to deal with your abuser by the legal system.
That's before you get into things like real cases where police gaslighted a rape victim into recanting, prosecuted them for reporting the rape, and only come around once they catch the rapist who kept the physical evidence of the rape exactly as reported. Or the public attacks against the credibility of people who report to police, have witnesses, photographic and video evidence and pursue a restraining order, exactly as people tell them to. Or people assume you're lying because you don't react the way they expect you to (hint: many rape victims do not weep or rage - mostly, they dissaociate, and come across as calm and a little cold, because on many levels, they're avoiding emotional connection to the events as a coping mechanism. But guess what behavior is extremely likely to make people doubt your accusation?).
So people wind up not reporting, and maybe convince themselves it was a one time thing, or maybe she played too big a role in it, and he's too important... then someone else mentions something. And someone else. And a fourth person. And it snowballs, and you wind up in a situation where none of the victims can make effective claims in court, but something is obviously wrong. Remaining silent means that others are going to go into interactions with this person unprepared. So, people say something. Eventually, enough people, with enough credibility, step forward. Some stuff that other members of the board have seen goes from odd to seriously concerning, so they step down. Some of them, like you, don't want to see action without a legal conviction, so they step down. who knows what the rest thinks, but good odds they just decide to give the org a fresh start.
Going to the police around sexual harassment has a poor track record of going anywhere, even with witnesses. Most of the time it winds up around competing accusations. Evidence is often scarce, and with charismatic folks involved, people may not realize the extent they've been manipulated until later. Abusers often target people who are not in a position to speak up, where their career could be at risk. Conventions are also a giant issue - doing all of this hundreds of miles distant even further reduces the odds of success, and ratchets up the stress. And, of course, the stress of spending the next few years being literally forced to deal with your abuser by the legal system.
That's before you get into things like real cases where police gaslighted a rape victim into recanting, prosecuted them for reporting the rape, and only come around once they catch the rapist who kept the physical evidence of the rape exactly as reported. Or the public attacks against the credibility of people who report to police, have witnesses, photographic and video evidence and pursue a restraining order, exactly as people tell them to.
So you wind up not reporting, and maybe convince yourself it was a one time thing, or maybe you played too big a role in it, and he's too important... then someone else mentions something. And someone else. And a fourth person. And it snowballs, and you wind up in a situation where none of you can make effective claims in court, but something is obviously wrong. Remaining silent means that others are going to go into interactions with this person unprepared. So, you say something.
So how do you create multiple playlist with the same song in multiple playlists without copying files to multiple locations?
With playlists, of course. I hate to overgeneralize, but most of the folks I know who still use players like this can't stand the Media Library approach that most modern players use - we already have an organizational system that makes it easy to find files, and may have .mp3 from back in the ID3v1 days with inaccurate or incomplete data. We may have a LOT of it. We may not want to spend hours fixing these files to make the Library work efficiently for us when we have a system that lets us build (and save!) custom playlists efficiently already.
How do you create a playlist with songs you haven't heard in the pass six months except for songs you've skipped x times? Yes iTunes is bloated piece of crap and I never let my iOS device go near it. But smart playlists and being able to view and sort your music based on metadata is not a bad thing.
In this case, you really can't. That's a definite tradeoff, but it's one I am okay making.
Everyone loves the Power Glove. It's so BAD.
3.5m - 5% for failed Pledges = 175k - 10% for Kickstarter and Credit Processor Fees = 350k - 20% for Taxes (this is income!) = 700k Total received budget ~= 2.28m Now, figure 30% of that is shipping (684k), 40% of it is manufacturing (912k). Left over: $684K Now, common wisdom is that hiring one guy at $60k a year costs you $100k a year total in physical plant, HR, Payroll, benefits, etc. While I doubt they had ALL of that, let's say they're five guys, so now they have $184k to absorb any unexpected expenses and such. So if you have to do thee site visits due to QC issues, or have a supplier disappear (not entirely unlikely, but one of the less well known issues), or have to hire two or three extra people to handle the volume you just weren't prepared for, that's gone, you don't have any flex left. And those are the more common issues - imagine you do two site visits and then have to pay to have someone else do your manufacturing at 50% more: because it turns out everyone was lowballing their quotes, and when you go back to the other companies they tell you that they can't do it at that price. Not excusing them, but people tend to go "How could they lose [LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY]" when the answer is "Most of what the campaign made was already earmarked to known costs - each pledge did not make them a lot of money, because what they were doing was expensive!" And they made the same scheduling and budgeting mistakes everyone makes.
After they were originally issued in the 30s and 40s, there was a fad where people would have their SSN tattooed on their body as the government emphasized the importance of remembering them. The semi-public nature of the SSN is kind of interesting. Originally, they were basically intended to track your contribution to Social Security - what would you do, fraudulently contribute to someone else's retirement? Thus far, I don't believe they've been reissued, but we're likely pretty close, since they're NOT just random number combinations. Now, it only took them a few years before things went... strangely, but not badly, but their continued flow into general life means that a system designed to be semi-public has now gotten tendrils everywhere, and protection on them is not as good as it should be.
Planes generally average around 500mph, and the average plane flight time between SF and LA is... roughly 57 minutes. You'd have to hit much higher speeds to not be survivable. You're just going to be spending the last 15 minutes slowing down gradually.
There's still plenty of room for improvement. Spacing out races and/or changing rules to prevent horses from competing in 'back to back' races would be more humane with very limited impact on the sport. Switching races to synthetic courses which have been shown to reduce the number of horses who need to be put down. Hell, switch to a team based model where you decide who's going to race 48 hours before the event, so there's some room for unexpected injuries and such to be healed.... oh, wait, gambling would take a big hit there, so that'll never happen.
I think people are getting hung up on some (admittedly bad) phrasing. The statement "Editor's note: I just got back from a busy weekend to see that a bunch of people are freaking out that we're "burying" this story, so here it is." isn't why they delayed the story, but why they're posting it now. That is, they were trying to gather information before the weekend, the weekend happened, they came back, and posted it without the additional info because they were seeing the freakout.
Most hate crime laws are based on racketeering charges - effectively a hate crime is one which targets one person as a means to target a larger group. Racketeering was used against criminals who attack one business to make others pay up protection money. When shooting someone who is gay/black/jewish/russian, because they're gay/black/jewish/russian, the message that gets communicated to the rest of the gay/black/jewish/russian community is 'You are not safe, we will kill you, unless you leave'. Generally speaking, most of the time, Hate Crime laws aren't applied, largely because you need to establish that the goal wasn't just to get the person, but because you wanted to have a chilling effect on people who are gay/black/jewish/russian as well. In the US, as well, hate crimes typically have to be Punishment Enhancing - that is, they can only attach to an existing crime, not on their own, and make the sentence worse.